


Deidre's Eyes

by Kildysart



Category: Original Work
Genre: Euthanasia, F/F, Lesbian Character, Lesbian Character of Color, Romance, animal rights
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-03
Updated: 2012-12-03
Packaged: 2017-11-20 05:27:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 10
Words: 46,864
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/581774
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kildysart/pseuds/Kildysart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's 1991 and America is, yet again, changing.  Lesbians and Gays are coming out despite social pressures to stay closeted, people of color and women are finding greater acceptance in professions once barred to them.  In this volatile climate, even quiet, normally invisible people are becoming accidental activists as the status quo no longer makes sense.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Dawes and Chris

**Author's Note:**

> The characters in this story are consensual, adult lesbians. If that bothers you, then the other issues presented in this story will make you livid. Go on to something more traditional. If you're okay with it, be advised that two other issues and how they're handled in this story may be, at the very least, upsetting: animal rights and human euthanasia. The story is set in 1991, when multiple sclerosis (MS) patients had far less reason to hope and when, coincidentally, we were beginning to realize technology's ability to keep people alive far beyond what we once believed was natural. I'm not advocating for anything here but the right of people with debilitating diseases to determine their own lives, regardless of the disease. Again, if such topics offend or upset you in any way, move on to another story. I've written this from my heart and my own experience, and needed to juxtapose our willingness to inflict pain and death on non-humans with our determination to maintain human life regardless of the quality of that life. It's an attempt to hold these contradictory values up to the light and it's the best I can do for now. Oh, yeah. And there's a 3-way in one scene. Almost forgot about that one. Apparently, it was the reason an editor turned it down for publication in 1992...

"I am bringing her down."

Dawes' light Quebecois accent came through the speaker calmly, its clarity undimmed by the accompanying static and background rhythm of the chopper's rotors.

"Damn," Chris muttered, and looked up at the ceiling to avoid meeting the others' eyes. Instinctively, she concentrated on the one emotion she could trust, simple and easily handled: anger.

That emotion grew in direct proportion to the increasing danger Dawes invited as she lowered the chopper to the roof of the flaming building.

"Doc, it's on TV!" Jared shouldered his way into the radio room, skidded the miniature television onto the desk next to the microphone, and turned down the sound.

"Perfect, asshole, now she can get really pissed off," Bailey whispered hoarsely to him, but Chris could hear. "She just ordered Dawes not to put down!"

"But there's a body on the roof..." the orderly sputtered.

"Right. And Dawes will have to set the chopper down on that roof, get out, pull what may be a corpse into the chopper, and get out of there before the whole thing self-destructs. Sound like a good idea to you?"

Chris watched the tiny screen. The picture, probably transmitted from a remote camera in the street below, was frustratingly poor. Dawes chopper, reduced to the size of a fruit fly, lowered slowly, swayed drunkenly, then dropped behind the building's outline. Chris' heart dropped with it.

"I am landed," Dawes' voice crackled on the radio, and Chris breathed. She felt an arm come around her back, fingers press into her shoulders. Bailey's soft scent yanked Chris off the helicopter, back to the Trauma Unit. She reached for the mike, and pressed the button.

"Report, Chopper 3, over." Chris released the button and waited. She glanced at the clock. How long does it take to haul a limp body across a frying pan the size of a basketball court, inhaling fumes all the way, stuff the body into a chopper, climb in after, and take off?

Too long, echoed in her brain as the seconds soundlessly, inexorably, moved from now to then. The clock's sweep hand jerked from one second to the next with violent finality.

"Oh, Jesus," Bailey whispered. "Where the hell is she?"

The camera operator may have been wondering the same thing; the image moved slightly, as though tempted to look elsewhere. Then the helicopter appeared over the roof, fought to gain lift, slowly angled out, and swung away.

As the camera panned to follow the chopper, Chris caught activity in the corner of the picture. Flames were engulfing the roof.

"Chopper Three, calling Trauma One. Come in One," Dawes called.

"Trauma One, what've you got Three?" Chris replied. Returning anger constricted her throat, grated her voice to a growl.

"One middle-aged male, very unconscious or very dead. Sorry I cannot be more specific, Trauma One."

"We'll be ready, Chopper Three. Out." Chris shoved the mike toward the radio. "Jared, turn that off and get it out of here," she barked, pointing at the toy of a television. Jared scooted out of the radio room, followed by the rest of the staff, except Bailey.

"Let's go," Chris muttered, but Bailey stayed her, hands on Chris' shoulders.

"I'm pissed at her too for taking that chance, Chris. But we both need to calm down before we meet that chopper."

Chris took a deep breath and let more than Bailey's words sink in. She looked into the nurse's eyes and recognized the strength of emotion she too was feeling.

"If you can restrain yourself from making it two dead-on-arrivals at the helipad, Bailey, so can I."

But there were no DOAs coming in on that flight. The man from the roof still had a ragged pulse and faint respiration. They loaded him on a gurney, Bailey started oxygen, and they wheeled off the helipad toward the treatment room.

Chris turned before following them, to scan Dawes who stood leaning against the helicopter. She was staring at her feet, two blobs of tar congealing to the cement.

"Are your feet burned?" Chris walked over to her, and lifted Dawes' hands to check for burns.

"No," Dawes tried to answer, but her voice was a croak. Chris looked up, still holding Dawes' hands, and was caught by her dark, almond eyes. Her soft, black curls were matted with sweat, one light walnut cheekbone smudged with tar.

Chris remembered, vaguely, she was angry with this woman, and it was freezing out on the helipad.

"You're sure you're alright?" she snapped.

Dawes took in a slow breath, pulled her hands back and stuffed them into her pockets. She smiled slightly and nodded, looking down and away.

"Lose the boots," Chris instructed, "and get yourself cleaned up. I'll send a nurse into the locker room to check your feet."

Dawes nodded again, and Chris turned as abruptly and finally as she could to run toward the activity of the Trauma Unit.

The patient still had not regained consciousness, but appeared stable. While a resident and another nurse removed the patient's clothing, Chris drew Bailey aside and instructed her to go check on Dawes in the locker room.

"Want me to give her any messages?" Bailey asked in a low voice, as she pulled off her gloves.

"Tell her the patient is stable," Chris replied, watching the staff work over him.

"Yes, Doctor," Bailey muttered with a smirk, "I'd intended to tell her that."

Chris looked over to the older woman who waited impatiently for an answer.

"Tell her," Chris sorted through her brain for a thought she would be willing to share. "I'll see her in my office later. Unless she needs treatment, in which case, bring her in here."

"Yes, Doctor." Bailey shook head as she left.

Chris turned back to the patient, concentrating on the burns discovered on one side of his body as they cut and peeled away his tar-caked clothing. When they were done, Chris left her staff to handle the patient's transfer to the hospital's burn unit. She stepped into the hallway toward her office just as Dawes emerged from the locker room with Bailey. A gauntlet of hospital employees had gathered outside the locker room.

Dawes smiled in recognition of their applause, but stiffly, one eye on the Chief Resident waiting solemnly at the end of the line. Chris tilted her head toward her office, turned and walked in that direction, and Dawes followed her. Chris had hoped her emotions would have settled by this time. She kept her back to Dawes until she heard the door shut, then turned to face the pilot across her desk.

She'd concentrated on her own emotions and was surprised to see Dawes' expression: compassion came softly, sweetly from the combination of large, dark eyes and gentle mouth. Chris looked away, as much to prevent Dawes from reading her as to quell this surge of new feeling. When she looked up again to those eyes, she wondered why they hadn't disturbed her this way all those other times -- especially over coffee, late at night, talking shop.

"Just get it over with," Dawes whispered, with the same soothing, disturbing compassion in her voice as was in her face.

"Damn you, Dawes," Chris whispered, not trusting to give her voice more volume. "What will you do?" She realized it was a stupid question before she finished it. Good chopper pilots have no trouble finding employment, even in a city the size of Madison.

Dawes smiled, glanced down at the objects she held in her hand, and said, "Keys. And badge."

Chris extended her arm, palm up. She and Dawes watched each other across the space as Dawes laid the key set and Trauma Unit staff badge in her hand. Her expression remained the same. Chris could only guess at her own.

"Do you want your check mailed?"

"That would be fine." Dawes waited a moment, but Chris couldn't sort through her thoughts for anything she wanted to say aloud. Dawes angled her head toward a hunching shoulder, murmured, "I could not resist trying. That's a bad sign, you know?" She turned, opened the door, and left.

Chris sat down, and stared for a long while at the keys and badge. Then she took an envelope from her desk, slipped the keys inside, reached for the badge, and stopped. Dawes' picture on the badge made Chris smile. Everybody else looked like hell in these things, she mused. But Dawes grinned back, seeming to be in the middle of a joke shared with the photographer, and the light reflecting from her brown, smooth face reminded Chris of bronze. Wasn't that how the ancient Greeks memorialized their athletes?

A knock at the door made Chris drop the badge into the envelope. Paula Freeman's head poked into the office.

"Reporters are here wanting to interview our hero. Where is she?" Paula was grinning ear to ear, a publicity and information officer in heaven. Chris could hear Dawes' gentle advice: get it over with.

"I just fired her." 

"What?" Her cheshire face sagged. She squeezed in, as though trying to keep something else from coming in, or getting out. "Tell me."

"I ordered her not to land on that roof. The thermals from the fire alone could have caused her to crash. And the fire had weakened the structure by that time--it was ready to collapse. She disobeyed my order, Paula. I had to fire her."

"But it didn't collapse! She saved a man's life!"

"The roof was all flames seconds after she took off. She wasn't equipped for a rescue, happened on the scene with no one else in the chopper to assist. We have rules about situations like this. Dawes risked her own life in the process of retrieving a man who may have been dead for all she knew when she decided to land. I don't want our chopper pilots to be daredevils, Paula. What they do day in and day out is risky enough. Dawes, the other pilots and I have discussed this before, and Dawes knew all the consequences of what she was doing."

"The press is gonna dump on us."

"Just tell it like it was, Paula," Chris smiled. "And be sure they get my name right."

She shook her head sadly, and left.

It didn't take long to hit the central air ducts. Chris had confrontations with the hospital administrator, the chief of staff, and, the one hardest to take, her lover.

"I just saw it on the news. Is it true? Did you fire that woman? How many other women pilots of color do you have on staff?" Ellen's voice over the phone had the sound of last straws snapping.

"El, I'd rather talk about this at home." That's not true, Chris thought. I'd rather not talk about this at all with Ellen. But she had to go home, and Ellen would be there--probably with a group of women forming a coalition to form committees to march on the hospital, raise a legal fund for Dawes to sue the hospital to get her job back, to publicize the march and the fund, and--what else? Ellen always organized a core of sixteen women for these things, four women to each of four committees.

But El wasn't there, only a note that she had a meeting. She checked the calendar and saw it was one of the few evenings left blank. Apparently the meeting was only just called.

"Wonder what the topic is..." Chris whispered to the refrigerator as she pulled out a beer.

She knew she shouldn't turn on the news, but was feeling a little swollen and numb. She wasn't sure another smack would hurt and, if it did, maybe that would feel better than numbness. She hadn't counted on the blow she took when the screen focused and Dawes stood looking back at her from the hospital parking lot. She was holding her bicycle as though reporters had caught her just getting ready to leave, her biking helmet in one hand.

"Some people are saying you should sue the hospital to get your job back. Will you do that?"

Dawes' dark eyes flashed over her high cheek bones, and the strong jaw became rigid. Only her lips, full and wide, didn't tighten with the other features of her face. It was the closest Chris had seen Dawes come to anger.

"I disobeyed an order and Dr. McCaleb did what she had to do. Don't make it more than it is. Or less."

Then Dawes was replaced on the screen by the news anchor back in the studio, and Chris snapped off the set.

She lifted her beer toward the TV with, "You're a better dyke than I, Dawes, my dear." She took a long swallow of the stuff. Then, as she let the emotion of the day well up and out in tears, "And the best pilot I had, damn you."

But she refused to articulate a knowledge that had been growing since she realized she had to fire Dawes. She finished her beer, hoping the slight buzz and sleepiness it produced would anesthetize her against the pain of any gnawing thoughts as she went to bed.

She slept fitfully, her night full of dreams she couldn't quite remember in the morning. As she showered, pieces would try to come to her with a familiar color or sensation, then nothing.

Ellen arrived as Chris was making coffee. "We need to talk. Do you have time, Chris?"

"About a half hour," Chris looked at Ellen and saw a woman who had not slept badly away from home. "Is that enough time to tell me you're leaving?"

Ellen sighed, and sat in her usual place at the table. Chris brought over two mugs of coffee, and sat in her place next to Ellen.

"Please tell me it's because you've fallen madly in love with a gorgeous, young, radical feminist who might someday be President."

"You'd like that?"

"I'd prefer that to being told I was impossible to live with, or that you've given up trying to educate me, or," Chris looked directly into her eyes, "your conscience won't allow you to live with a woman you perceive as anti-feminist."

Ellen looked down at her coffee. Chris watched her soft hair; black, shiny strands dipping in concert with the weight of themselves to curve sweetly against her face.

"You're not anti-feminist," Ellen whispered.

Chris suspected Ellen had been defending that viewpoint to her coalition throughout the previous evening.

"But not feminist enough." Chris placed her hand against that head of soft, dark hair. Ellen looked up, tears now released with Chris' touch.

"I _am_ in love with someone else," Ellen admitted, "but I still love you. It's just..."

"Life and loving are easier with her." Chris said, wanting to soothe the pain for her. "Is she in love with you?"

"Yes." Ellen looked up again at Chris. The tears had stopped; talking about this new love had strengthened her. Chris envied that feeling.

"I want to be with her, but I have to leave you to do that."

"Then go pack," Chris rose, kissed Ellen for what she knew would be the last time she'd feel those perfect, delicate lips against hers, and that soft, full hair woven through her fingers. She pulled back a little, smiled with her eyes until she saw a reassuring smile in Ellen's eyes, nodded to her, and left for the hospital.

* * *

"Alvin, I hate this political shit and you know it!" The Chief of Staff stared back at her as though she'd popped a flashbulb in his eyes. His mugshot expression forced a quick, one syllable laugh to erupt from her, but that only seemed to move him from shock to consternation. "Look, Alvin, I'm sorry to let this mess make me blow up at you, but I feel as though I'm trying to explain my position to people who don't even speak my language."

A gleam in his eyes made Chris set her feet. Whenever Alvin got an idea or saw a connection, he poked the air in front of him as though he were tapping for soundness. "Exactly," he said, his index finger curved and dipping rhythmically. "And, when people who speak different languages try to work out a problem, they use diplomacy. That's what I want you to do, Chris. Use diplomacy with these people."

"I'm not working for the State Department, Alvin. I jump start people's hearts, force their lungs to accept air again, patch their gaping, squirting holes, and, when all else fails, sign their death certificates. Maybe that's Fred Grindell's problem, Alvin. He has never signed a death certificate."

"What do you mean?"

"He doesn't understand that people die. All the time. I'm not going to waste a moving, breathing, healthy person for one that's spread out like a piece of meat on a grille."

Her voice had gained volume again, and the ring left in the room as she took a breath made her stop. Alvin stared down at his folded hands on the desk before him.

"Fred will be here any minute, Chris. Please try to avoid the more graphic explanations of your position."

"I'm sorry, Alvin. You're right."

Try to think of it as a learning experience, Chris reminded herself. She had never mastered the finer points of political gamesmanship--"diplomacy" as Alvin Wachter delicately termed it. She appreciated the way he was obviously siding with her in this, but it irked her that he, a physician like herself, seemed to understand little more than Fred Grindell did. Perhaps, Chris thought as she watched the Chief of Staff frown over the ever present heap of forms on his desk, she should appreciate Alvin even more for that. She'd had enough experience with hospital and university administrators to know that his kind of loyalty to staff was rare, especially in the face of negative public opinion.

"I'm sorry I'm late," Fred boomed, his white coat flapping in his own wind. Chris wished Alvin would thank him for not having wasted more of their time by knocking before crashing, but he merely smiled and waved Fred to a chair.

"I'll sit if you will," Fred sang, grinning merrily at her as though they were about to play musical chairs.

Alvin shot to his feet, leaned over his desk and, with an outstretched, imploring palm, indicated the empty chair opposite Fred's. "Yes, Chris, sit down, please," Alvin said quickly, his eyes never leaving hers.

Chris shut her mouth, and Alvin seemed to relax. She'd been on the verge of lipping off to Grindell, but had no idea what she would have said. Probably something about Grindell's habit of wearing white doctors' coats although the closest he got to the practice of medicine was to sign some of the big ticket purchase orders. 'Oh, Alvin,' she thought, 'thank you.'

"Well, Fred," Alvin started once all three were sitting, "it's your meeting."

It's your office, Chris wanted to say, wishing Alvin wouldn't give up territory so easily. Which made her wonder, as Fred began to intone some meaningless prologue about professionals coming together to solve complex issues of the practice of modern medicine, how the meeting had been located in Alvin's office if Fred Grindell had requested it in the first place. Wouldn't it have been to Fred's advantage to have them come to him in his office?

"I was glad to come here," Fred droned, not seeming to notice the eye contact between Chris and Alvin, "to accommodate your hectic schedule, Chris, as Alvin asked. I want you to know that this hospital respects your dedication and hard work."

Chris wished she had the stomach for this kind of thing. She had a feeling she was missing a wealth of learning by not studying Alvin Wachter more closely.

"That's what I want you to keep foremost in your mind," Fred continued, and Chris tensed for something nasty. She noticed Alvin was also stiffening. "We respect your decision-making abilities and your dedication, but we have to overrule you on this one. We are going to offer the young lady her job back. We just feel it's the right thing to do."

Chris looked down at her hands, so they wouldn't see the hint of smile she knew was sitting there.

"Don't do this, Fred," Alvin said, very quietly.

"Now, Alvin, I understand. You're famous for standing by your people, and we respect you to the hilt for that. But this young lady did a very brave thing, and to seem to punish her for saving a man's life..." he spread out his hands for them to see the clarity of his logic.

"Dr. McCaleb has established sound policies for the operation of that air rescue unit, policies this hospital has up to now claimed to be its own." Alvin's face was calm, and his voice was even.

"And we still stand by them. That hasn't changed a bit," Fred smiled and nodded at Chris.

"This is not standing by them. This is breaking policy." Alvin's voice still traveled the room at a rational, even decibel level. Chris studied his face; his eyes seemed glued in their sockets. He was furious.

"I have a feeling, Alvin, that this is a done thing," Chris smiled, and shook her head.

Fred nodded, compressing his facial muscles in a vain effort to appear regretful. "You're right, Chris. Alvin, we've already announced to the press that the hospital is reversing its position on this. Personnel has been instructed to contact Miss Dawes and give her an offer she can't refuse."

Chris swallowed hard to stifle a laugh like the one that had escaped earlier. 

"You've announced publicly that you're rehiring her, before you've spoken with her about this?"

Fred pulled a heavy brow down for the stern approach. "Alvin, there was no point in speaking with Chris any further. I understand her position on this, but it is not the hospital's position."

"I'm not talking about speaking to Chris," Alvin was close to grinding his teeth now, in his effort to maintain control of his voice. "That would have required a level of courtesy you and the Board are incapable of reaching. Why in hell would you publicly announce that you're rehiring the pilot when you don't even know if she'll accept your offer?"

"Of course she'll accept. Nobody wants to be fired."

Alvin looked up at the ceiling, so Fred looked at Chris for confirmation. Whatever he saw in her face caused him worry. "Why wouldn't she want to be vindicated?"

"Because, Fred," Chris said as she rose to leave, "she agreed with me that it was a stupid thing to do."

"But she'll still want her job back, won't she?" Fred's voice was losing its professional bass, Chris noticed, as she left Alvin's office.

* * *

"Jared says the hospital went over your head and is going to hire Dawes back," Bailey said, her voice low as she carefully wiped blood away from Chris' eye. They had just finished replumbing a stabbed artery, and Chris as well as two interns had been in the path of the gusher in the process. Chris watched the two inspect each other while Bailey shined a light in her ears. "Can you believe she'd go along with that?"

"Do you?"

"Have you always been so open with your opinions, Doctor, or is this something you developed as part of your healing art?"

Chris shrugged. "They said they'd make her an offer she can't refuse."

"Dawes responding positively to the godfather approach? I don't think so," Bailey shook her head, glanced once more at each of the openings around Chris' face, and nodded. "Besides, Dawes told me in the locker room that she needed to do less tempting work for awhile."

"Tempting?"

"This socially-approved russian roulette we all play here. C'mon, Chris, don't stonewall me. I might have just scrubbed three million HIV virus particles off your face because you yanked off your shield in front of a geyser."

"I couldn't see through the shield to clamp properly, Bailey," Chris felt irritated at her insinuation that it was a macho move.

"His life or yours?" Bailey whispered, her hand pressed soothingly against Chris' side. She'd made her point and left it there with a gentle pat. Chris did know exactly what she meant, but stuffed it away without scrutinizing it. She was no Evel Knievel, madly leaping rows of cars on a Harley. There was a difference between that and taking risks to save human lives, but Dawes had crossed the line. Chris had thought through all that long ago in her career, and didn't need to re-examine the argument in detail. "The odds he has anything contagious are really slim," Chris grumbled, using an alcohol wipe on her gloved hands. "I'll worry when his blood work comes back."

But she left another side of it blurred as she and Bailey turned away to finish cleaning up. As Chris stuffed her gloves and the alcohol-and-blood soaked towelette into a burn bag, she barely acknowledged that the comatose patient they'd just patched and sent to Intensive Care might now be brain-damaged due to extended oxygen deprivation while he bled in an alley.

Bailey walked back over, frowning, and said in a low voice, "Jared said it was on this morning's news. So, they'd already made the deal with Dawes, right?" To Chris' silent smile, Bailey tossed her head impatiently. "Isn't modern technology wonderful? If that camera hadn't been out there watching a building burn, Dawes wouldn't be a hero, and we wouldn't look like we have our heads up our collective butt."

"Dawes would still be a hero, but fewer people would know about it, and those that did wouldn't think it was for that stunt on the roof," Chris countered wryly. It had seemed so serious a few days ago, even as late as that morning, but since the meeting in Alvin's office she'd been trying to restrain the urge to laugh.

She left the treatment room and crossed the hall to her office, not really seeing the doors as she opened them and walked through. In her mind repeated the giddy scene through a Volkswagon bug's windshield, as she spun in circles down an ice-coated Boston street ten years before. She'd hit the brakes at the top of the hill when a squirrel darted in front of the car. No cars were parked at the curbsides and, in that hushed blue-gray frozen dawn, she had the whole street to herself as the VW pirouetted dizzily toward the bottom of the hill. When she was midway down, she saw a car at the bottom approaching from the opposite direction. Its driver must have hit the brakes when he saw the VW, because he suddenly slid sideways and bounced against the curb.

She could see the driver's face staring up at her as the VW continued its uncontrolled spinout. She lifted both hands from the steering wheel, palms upward, and smiled. He didn't smile back. Her car came to rest against the opposite curb, having missed his by a good two feet before veering off.

Chris sat at her desk and wondered what had brought that old memory forward. The phone rang, and she yanked herself back.

"Chris, Alvin. Dawes turned them down. Fred's headed for your office to ask you to convince her to change her mind."

She let it out this time, a good, solid belly laugh.

Alvin didn't join her. "Chris, I have surgery in ten minutes, otherwise I'd be on the stairs to beat his elevator. Please cover your feelings. It won't do you a bit of good to let him know what you really think of him."

Chris felt the hilarity calming to humor. Poor Alvin. "It's okay, Alvin. I'm a lot better at stonewalling than you think. I will be diplomatic and in control."

She hung up as her door opened. At least he's knocking now, she thought, as Grinnell stood with one hand on the knob of the open door, the other raised and lightly tapping his knuckles on the wood.

"May I come in?"

You're in, idiot. "Have a seat, Fred."

"Well, my dear, you were right," he expelled the sentence in a huff of air as he plopped into a chair.

"About what, Fred?"

"Miss Dawes," he fairly hissed her name. "After all the fuss that bunch of feminists from the university raised, after all this media attention, she doesn't want her job back. Didn't those women ask her before they started making all this racket?"

Oh, Fred, are you baiting me or what? "Apparently not."

"Well, it's left us in a mess, trying to be open-minded, trying to show we care about minorities and women. We can't call another press conference and say she turned us down, we've already told them we're hiring her back! It could ruin our credibility with the community," Fred said somberly, leaning forward for emphasis.

Here it comes, Chris.

"Chris, you can solve this for the hospital and for Miss Dawes. She's probably too young to recognize the error of burning her bridges behind her, but Alvin tells me, and I'm sure it's true because I've observed myself the leadership you've shown here, that Miss Dawes admires you."

He paused either for confirmation or to let the oil sink in, then continued with, "I'm convinced that Miss Dawes would come back to work here if you personally appealed to her--let her know how much she's needed here. We offered her a generous salary, but she turned it down!" His disbelief rode high on his eyebrows. "Obviously, something else was holding her back and, knowing how women are such strong team workers, I'm sure she needs more than anything to hear you say she'd be welcome."

Chris held his gaze steadily. She controlled the urge to laugh by breathing gently. "Fred, Dawes is the best pilot I had. The fact that she recognized she's crossed a line is just proof of what it takes to be a good pilot."

Fred nodded earnestly, obviously not understanding a word. Chris continued, hoping he would eventually get it, "The risk she took was giving in to a temptation pilots in her situation often face. Firefighters, police," Chris waved her hands to emphasize how widespread the phenomenon is, "anyone who faces danger day in and day out. You get addicted to the adrenaline surge. You keep pushing the envelope. Eventually, you go too far."

Fred nodded, but this time Chris saw a spark of understanding. "Right. She disobeyed your orders."

Shit. Chris took a deep breath, and started again, "No, Fred, that's not the point I'm making. I'm saying she risked her life when she shouldn't have." Fred opened his mouth and began to harrumph a retort, but Chris raised her voice several decibels higher to finish her point. "She knows that, Fred. She knows she might well do it again if she comes back here. Dawes may be addicted to adrenaline, but she's not suicidal. You can't pay her enough to come back to crash and burn."

Fred sat, speechless, and stared at the window behind Chris. She had the eerie impression the guy was thinking.

"You're not going to help us with this, are you?"

"I respect her decision. I agree with her."

"I thought you were a team player, Doctor. It's a great disappointment to me," he rose, using his mass to emphasize his words.

What a guy, Chris thought. What a predictable, obvious guy.

"I'm sure it is, Fred," Chris responded flatly; humor and anything else resembling energy of feeling gone from her soul. Like talking to a creature without ears, Alvin.

As Fred left, Chris realized she felt worse for Alvin than she did for herself, even though it would be her life that Fred would make holy hell for many bureaucratic maneuverings to come.

* * *

As the days wore into weeks, she realized that El's leaving actually helped. With no reason to go home and plenty of reason to stay away while El transferred more and more of her belongings to her new home, Chris found it easier to spend all her time at the hospital and ride it out. The Trauma Unit's constant, dynamic action forced her to focus, and pumped energy into what otherwise might have been empty, exhausting hours of meaningless conflict. 

Ultimately, it was Dawes who defused the situation. She gave a statement to the press, almost as brief as the one Chris had viewed that first evening, explaining that her method had not been conducive to the safe operation of rescue helicopters. She thanked the coalition for their dedication, then assured them this was not a case of discrimination on any grounds: gender, race or ethnicity.

"I never thought of that until this thing," Bailey said to Chris as they watched Dawes' statement on the late news. Bailey stretched as she rose from the armchair in Chris' office and switched off the set. "I guess I just thought of what a magnificent hunka woman she is."

Chris laughed and shook her head. She believed Bailey, though. Somehow the woman had escaped her generation's intense pressure to think in stereotypes, racial or otherwise, except perhaps where dykes were concerned. Bailey blatantly like dykes, though Chris was never sure about Bailey's own lifestyle.

After that evening, the conflict abated rapidly, Dawes having removed herself as focal point. Chris continued to spend as much time at work, however, still needing to fill a void. It was late spring, months later, before she stepped out to the parking lot of the hospital and consciously breathed a deep, appreciative lungful of fresh air.

She drove, not really caring where, just to let the mechanics of driving occupy her mind. The evening air moving across her face from the open window was warm and heavy, full of the smell of rain. It would storm tonight, she thought. Good. Traffic was a little hectic downtown, so she turned off from the main street, then back onto a parallel street. She read the theater marquees and watched the couples moving through the Saturday night traffic. 

"Straight love stories, straight horror stories, straight war stories," she murmured, quoting a comment El had made once as they drove this street trying to decide whether to take in a movie or go to the bar early. They went to the bar. On this street. Chris realized that's where she had been driving all along, but didn't let herself know that because she didn't intend to go in. She just wanted to see if a particular vehicle would be parked nearby. 

The realization daunted her. It had been many, many years since she'd cruised past a location just to see if someone's car were there, or to catch a glimpse of her. 

"This is not mature," Chris whispered, letting her car decelerate as she scanned the vehicles in the small lot and at the curb in front of the bar. It wasn't there. What made her think it would be?

She turned off, angry at herself for needing to find her tonight, for feeling so disappointed at not finding her. This was hurting worse than the loneliness of the last few months without El--to finally open up and hope a little, let herself feel even this little bit, only to have circumstances deny the feeling. 

But what if she had been there? What would you have done, Chris asked herself. She let herself imagine, as she drove out of the business district and toward the lakes, going in the bar and seeing her. Sit at her table, order a beer, talk? She saw her face across the table, smiling, laughing, glad to see Chris.

"Reality," Chris whispered to herself, surprised at the emotion choking her as she tried to voice her thought. The reality would be that, had she been there, she'd have been at a table with friends, no empty chairs, no way to hear what anyone had to say without yelling over the incessantly loud music. Chris would have walked in, seen her, and stood stupidly, vulnerably, at the bar to get a beer, just to have something to do. This new image of their meeting amplified her shame and her sense of loneliness.

Something splatted hard against her windshield and she jumped, then more splats, a bright flash, and a horrendous crash. The rain continued heavily--big, fat, summer-like rainstorm drops, punctuated by bright lightning and fierce thunder. Chris pulled over at the corner, letting the other cars on the street go by, and began to cry as rain washed across the windshield. She let the feeling come now, sobbing freely and hidden by sheets of water streaming down the windows. She was in love with her, had been all along, and had missed her every day since.

A knock on the glass by her head shattered her thoughts. Someone was standing in the rain next to her car, motioning for her to roll down her window. Lightening flashed, illuminating a woman in running clothes, hunched as much from the downpour as to be on eye level with Chris. Dawes.

She was already speaking as Chris rolled down her window, "...give shelter to a drowning woman?" Her smile was wide in greeting, just as Chris had imagined her face would look across the table. Then Dawes' expression changed.

"Are you okay?" She lowered herself, disregarding the rain pouring down on her, her face all concern and on a level with Chris'. That face, Chris thought, the same expression of compassion as the day she handed in her keys and badge. Dawes reached in, put her hand gently against Chris' face, and wiped with her thumb lightly at the wet streaks on her cheek.

"This is not rain," Dawes murmured. Chris' tears started up anew at the touch, the voice, the caring in Dawes' eyes. "Unlock the passenger side," Dawes instructed, and was at the other door by the time Chris realized what she had said.

Dawes got in, shut the door, looked past Chris and smiled, "Raise your window. You're getting as wet as I am."

Chris obeyed automatically. When she turned back to Dawes, her tears had stopped, but she knew she couldn't speak. 

"What's wrong?"

"I need a kleenex," Chris whispered.

Dawes pulled a wad of fresh kleenex from her jacket pocket, and leaned close to her with the offering. "That's nothing to cry about, Doctor."

Chris blew her nose and dried her eyes, wondering how to begin to tell Dawes. She looked at the woman sitting next to her, patiently waiting despite her drenched condition. "What's wrong is, you're soaked. We'd better get you home."

"Okay," Dawes ran a hand through her short, limp curls, "probably we can talk better there anyway."

She directed Chris to drive down one of the tree-lined streets off the park for several blocks. They stopped before a huge, old house. It was one of several on the block that had been made over to apartments, with open, wooden stairways added to the sides.

"I'm on the second floor," Dawes warned, "are you ready to get wet?"

The squall had not let up, but Chris was anxious now to get out of the car. She felt a definite need for physical activity. As Chris jumped out, the rain hit her whole body at once. She could feel it soaking her jeans and shirt and, as she ran around the front of the car, found a minor flood forming in the street by the curb. Water poured into her shoes before she could jump to the sidewalk. 

Waves of rain, driven by strong gusts, rocked the tops of trees and whipped their dense limbs heavily toward the street and the wide lawns. Dawes led her in a sprint through a wrought iron gate, and along a flagstone walkway to the front porch. At the porch steps the walkway forked. Dawes veered to the right, taking the path to the driveway, which led to a side stairway. They took the steps two at a time, and were both breathless when they reached the inside landing on the second floor.

As they peeled off their shoes and socks, Chris realized she would be taking off more than that when she got into Dawes' apartment. She straightened, shoes and socks in hand, to find Dawes looking back at her with a faint smile. Chris wondered if the same thought had occurred to Dawes. They stood, dripping and staring at each other. Chris became sure, as she watched Dawes' eyes watching hers, that Dawes needed Chris to decide. 

"We'd better get on with it, then," Chris said softly, feeling an increasing pull toward the woman whose eyes watched her so intently. Dawes' head tilted ever so slightly, and the smile grew just a bit. It wasn't enough, Dawes was saying. Tell me.

Chris dropped the footgear from her hands, stepped toward Dawes who opened her arms and closed them behind Chris as she reached up and over Dawes' shoulders. As their lips met, Chris felt a little shudder run through the muscles of Dawes' back. She moved her hand up the back of Dawes' neck to gently press against the back of her head, increasing the pressure of their lips, and Dawes pulled back against her hand. Their lips separated, Dawes opened her eyes slowly and smiled.

"You're in love with me, too," Chris said.

"For so long." Dawes then kissed her neck, pulling Chris closer, pressing their bodies together. "Let's get inside," she laughed, "we are starting to dry off with all this heat."

Dawes opened the door and let Chris go in first. As she stepped through, Chris knew her first inclination, to drop her clothes there and get on with it, would have to be revised. Dawes's apartment was not what Chris had expected--the functional living quarters of a pilot with a reputation for a very active social life. Instead, as Chris stood in the oak panelled entryway, she faced a Victorian room of overstuffed chairs, oriental rugs, and polished wood. It was a room for conversation and reading, built-in shelves of books on either side of a large fireplace, the chairs and sofa arranged in a half-circle to face each other and the fireplace.

Dawes drew Chris back to the subject, pulling her close and continuing the kiss they had interrupted in the hall.

She drew back and looked at Chris, "What?"

"I'm dripping on your rug."

"It has suffered worse, I'm sure. But, if you feel more comfortable not dripping, I better show you the bathroom, some towels, and dry clothes." 

Chris made a face at the "...dry clothes," and Dawes laughed, took her hand, and led her through the room to a bathroom complete with clawfoot tub and a brass oval halo from which draped a white shower curtain.

She was amused to see Dawes busying herself with arranging towels for her on a washstand. 

"I'll make us some coffee and get you some light sweats." Dawes said, and turned to leave.

"Where are you going?" Chris grabbed Dawes' face between the palms of her hands. "You just told me you were in love with me. I've been miserable, wasting months of loneliness thinking about you. Now I find out you were in love with me all along. You're not going anywhere!"

"Chris, I need to take a shower--I did do a few miles before the rain started and I spotted your car. I will get you into something dry," Dawes unbuttoned Chris' shirt as she spoke, "then you have a cup of coffee and I will shower." 

She pulled Chris closer, sliding her shirt over her shoulders and down. She stopped with the shirt at the middle of Chris' back and stared at her breasts. She bent and kissed first one, then the other, and Chris felt pleasure begin to warm her, pressing her hips closer against Dawes.

"Forget the coffee," Chris murmured, and slipped her arms out of the shirt Dawes still held across her back. She unzipped Dawes' running jacket. Dawes shed it quickly, then her running bra and shorts. She stood before Chris naked, tall, muscular, her dark skin glistening.

"My god, you're a beautiful woman!" Chris whispered.

"Chris, I want you in my bed. That's where I imagined..." Dawes seemed embarrassed to admit her romanticism, but it pleased Chris. She had allowed herself similar fantasies, though one of them did involve a shower.

"We'll wash fast," Chris said, peeling off her jeans. 

Dawes reached into the shower and started the water. They stepped in when the temperature was right, and stood, kissing. Chris found the soap and began moving it over Dawes' body, enjoying again her muscular beauty, her firm breasts, and Dawes' obvious pleasure.

"My turn," Dawes whispered, took the soap from Chris and began the same process to Chris' body. As Dawes soaped Chris' back, she pulled her close, their now soapy fronts gliding together smoothly. Their breasts slid against and over each other, back and forth as they moved. 

"Oh, Chris," Dawes breathed, and kissed her hard, pressing her tight against her body, stopping their motion. "Let's get to bed!"

They parted a little, letting the water rinse the soap from their skin, their hands again exploring each other's body. As Chris stroked between Dawes' legs, she felt more there than soap rinsing away, and she was sure Dawes was feeling the same between Chris' legs.

Dawes turned off the water, reached for a towel, and began drying Chris, pressing the towel against her body in regular, slow rhythms. She worked the towel from Chris' head, neck, and shoulders downward, and Chris began kissing her still wet neck, sucking here and there at the droplets clinging to her ear, her neck, her jaw. 

Dawes pulled back and knelt, slipping out of Chris' embrace to move the towel down her legs. Chris had to reach for the wall to steady herself, the sudden lack of contact leaving her achingly unattached.

"Please, Dawes, get back up here," she called. As she slowly rose, Dawes moved her lips along Chris' legs, but stopped to press her face into the soft juncture, her hands pressing Chris closer from the back. The ache growing now, Chris pulled away, knelt quickly, and pulled Dawes' face to her own, kissing her deeply. Dawes tongue pressed softly at first, then with greater urgency as their lips parted and met again.

Dawes rose, pulling Chris up with her, moved the shower curtain aside, and led her out of the tub, out of the bathroom, and across the hall to the bedroom. She laid Chris on the large bed, then lay on top of her, warming her, kissing her lips, her neck, shoulders, breasts.

As she sucked gently at Chris' breast, Dawes reached down between Chris' legs and began to massage the lips, which parted easily with their full moisture. Dawes' long, strong fingers slid gently, firmly into Chris' body, and began to flutter, sending waves of pleasure upward. Chris could only hold on, feeling it wash over her, wave after wave as Dawes whispered in her ear.

Dawes loved her; the knowledge of that, the understanding that came to her in the way this woman was carressing her, reveling in her, surged up through her center.

Dawes continued to whisper, kiss, whisper more, and brought her knee between Chris' legs to increase the pressure of her hand moving more firmly now. Chris moved her hips back and forth, unable to remain still, and heard her own voice in short cries growing ever stronger with the heightening ecstasy. Then Chris screamed and held on as one after another wave stirred up and over her. 

As the intensity subsided, Chris rubbed her head against Dawes' neck, in rhythm with the abating, delightful spasms. Dawes relaxed the pressure of her leg and hand, and began gently stroking, eliciting more small spasms. Chris chuckled softly into Dawes' neck, and ran her tongue along its curve, kissed her jaw lightly. 

"Oh, Chris," Dawes smiled her name, her eyes closed, moving her head to present more places on her chin for Chris to kiss. Chris could feel, as she moved her hands over Dawes' body, that Dawes was still ready, still needing. 

"Your turn," Chris whispered, eliciting a pleased little hum from Dawes, who slowly, gently removed her fingers from inside Chris. 

She lay back then, while Chris moved over her with kisses. Kneeling over Dawes, Chris could feel her excitement renewing itself. She let her breasts brush lightly against her as she made a pattern of kisses, starting at her neck and working downward slowly. As Chris kissed her stomach, she positioned herself between Dawes' legs, spreading them wide. Chris rubbed her face against the soft, lovely hair.

"Chris, I don't know if I can stand..." but Chris was already massaging with her thumbs, working them deeper as Dawes' words wandered into a long sigh. When she flicked her tongue back and forth across the smaller tongue, Dawes moaned loudly and pressed Chris' head in closer. Chris pulled Dawes' thighs in to give her more pressure and began using only her tongue.

"No, Chris, please get up here," Dawes called. Chris laughed and released her, but as she moved up to eye level with Dawes, Chris pulled herself straight up the middle, her body dragging against the spot she'd just concentrated on. Dawes cried out and flipped Chris over, straddling Chris' leg.

Dawes began to move, slowly at first, then hard and fast. Chris could feel her repeated spasms, and Dawes, trying to muffle her voice, pressed her face into the pillow. Dawes' passion renewed Chris', and she began to tremble against Dawes' muscular leg, just as Dawes was shuddering against hers. Their voices blended, and the song carried their passion higher.

For a brief moment, at the top, Chris felt her mind float. Then, it passed, and she let herself begin to relax. She felt Dawes loosening too, their movement subsided, shifted, changed to a sleepy, playful rubbing. They lay together, finally, holding to each other, and slept.

* * *

It was morning when she woke, a dim pre-dawn light shyly entering the room to find them lying close. Chris had slept well, despite waking now and then to Dawes kissing her neck, or one of her breasts, or her shoulder. But Dawes hadn't wakened her this time. She'd heard a sound--a far-off, muted, hollow tapping--just briefly, which she couldn't identify. She lay listening for it again, but it didn't recur. 

"Sue, from downstairs," Dawes murmured, "filling the bird feeders." She reached across Chris with one arm and one leg, and began to kiss her neck.

"You are a very tactile person," Chris smiled.

"Umm. Does it bother you?" Dawes worried look made her laugh.

"Bother me? C'mere, you!"

Their wrestling lasted long enough to position their legs together, then they worked into a rhythm that now seemed familiar. It was, Chris found herself thinking as she moved with Dawes, as though they'd been lovers a long time, knew each other's body from long practice. 

This lovemaking, Dawes was playful, joyfully biting and kissing, laughing as Chris played back. Chris was taken by surprise, therefore, when Dawes reached into her and touched a level of passion Chris didn't know she'd attained. Dawes chuckled at Chris' astonishment, and began to lick the nipple of her breast as she continued to move her fingers inside. 

Chris reacted immediately, intensity welling up and out. She felt herself pouring over Dawes, and felt Dawes coming over her, Dawes' voice in her ear, a whisper, almost a sob, "Chris, I love you." Then they were rocking together, their movement slowing.

Dawes hummed a sigh in her ear, chuckled, and rolled over onto her back, taking Chris with her. Chris lay on top of her, nuzzled into her neck, and fell back to sleep.


	2. Deidre and Sue

When next she woke, the sun was much higher and filling the room with light. Dawes lay, propped on one elbow, looking down at her.

"Good morning, Doctor," she whispered, smiling.

A cool breeze danced the curtains at the windows, drawing Chris' attention. She stretched, and looked about the room. The furniture was the same period as Dawes' living room furniture, heavy Victorian pieces, including the massive bed.

"Dawes, your apartment is beautiful. The furniture..."

"My grandparents'," Dawes murmured close to Chris' ear. "Thank you."

Chris grinned, a little embarrassed to admit it, "I didn't expect your place to look anything like this."

"Mattresses on the floor, maybe?"

"Wall-to-wall."

"You have a very high opinion of the woman you've been in love with for months."

"I was accurate about your love-making abilities. But, then, your reputation preceded you."

"Doctor, your ears hear gossip?"

"Anything I heard about you."

"It was difficult to learn about you. Until Ellen left you and started coming to the bar with her young friend. Then it was easier, with everyone keeping an eye on how you were."

"Keeping an eye on me?"

"You have many friends, Doctor, at the hospital, especially. And, of course, a few selfish people like me. In fact, I know some surgical nurses who would love to be in my position right now."

"You mean, I could have been having this much fun all this time?" Chris laughed, a little flustered by the idea, but Dawes had become serious.

"Chris, I didn't know you were hurting so badly, or I would have come to you. I saw you once, and you looked the same. And people I talked to said you seemed fine at work. I thought, if I stayed out of it, perhaps you and Ellen would get back together."

"I hope you don't feel responsible for that!"

"Of course, I do."

"Dawes, she was in love with Julie before I fired you. It was just a matter of time, believe me." Chris watched her face as Dawes looked back up into her eyes. How could she have walked away from those eyes that day? "Besides, I was in love with you."

"I knew that, when I saw how angry you were with me".

They lay together thinking their own thoughts for a while, then Chris asked, "If it hadn't been raining so hard, would you have stopped at my car?"

"You mean, if I just saw you parked somewhere?"

"Yes."

Dawes laughed, "I was waiting for a chance like that! Of course I would."

"Good," Chris rolled over on top of her and held her tightly. "It would scare me to think all this was just thanks to a rainstorm."

"In fact, I was trying to get the nerve to call you."

"You needed nerve to call me?" Chris drew back and looked at Dawes. It didn't fit her idea of the woman.

"Yes. You don't see? If you were in love with me, why didn't you call me?"

"Oh, Dawes, I wanted to. I wanted so much to see you. But, you're right. We put up high barricades to protect ourselves, then we need courage to climb over them to reach each other."

"Ah, but what an impact when we finally come together!" Dawes laughed, ceasing to rub Chris' back and squeezing her in a tight hug. "Chris, I hate to get up, I love being in this bed with you, but I'm starving."

"That's partly because you smell breakfast. I'm smelling it, too."

"Downstairs. Sue and Deidre," Dawes was out of bed and drawing Chris up.

"Sue and Deidre?" 

Dawes nodded to Chris' emphasis, "Yes, in the family." She led Chris out of the bedroom and into the bathroom.

"Dawes, if we get in there together, we'll end up back in bed again."

Dawes reached in and turned on the water. "No need." She turned back toward Chris, pulling her close, "We'll take care of everything in the shower."

* * *

The phone rang as Dawes was opening her closet and dresser to Chris' selection and pulling out shorts and shirts they thought would fit.

"Hello? Yes, that would be great. My stomach is growling since you sent the coffee aroma up this way. Be down in five or ten minutes."

"Sue and Deidre?"

"Breakfast is served on the patio, Mademoiselle." Dawes walked back over to Chris as she pulled on a pair of Dawes' underpants. "I wish we could go naked. I hate to cover you."

"We? Do they know I'm here?" Chris laughed, "Or, do they just assume you have a guest every Sunday morning?"

"No!" Dawes feigned shock, then laughed, "But, they do know you are here. I guess we made enough noise last night and this morning that they planned one more for breakfast."

"One more? You have breakfast with them every morning?"

"Sundays, when I am here. Are you ready?" Dawes kissed her deeply. Chris marvelled again at the emotion Dawes' touch could summon from her.

"My god, Dawes, I could make love with you again, I think."

"The bikini underwear," Dawes laughed. "A change from your white cotton briefs."

"I'm serious!"

"I know," Dawes kissed her again. "We will probably wear each other out for awhile, but then settle in and be an old married couple."

The thought struck Chris for the first time. With any luck, this was the woman she would be with for the rest of her life.

Dawes tilted her head the way she had on the landing the night before. She needed Chris to speak her thoughts.

"I love you, Dawes. I want to be with you from now on."

Dawes' smile made Chris take a deep breath. "It is done, then," Dawes responded.

They finished dressing, then left down the steps they had raced up the evening before. The sky was clear now, and the day beginning to heat up under a strengthening sun. It would be humid as the previous night's soaking evaporated. At the bottom of the stairs, Dawes led Chris along the driveway, toward the back of the house, and through the gate of a privacy fence. Beyond the gate, they followed old stones laid in a path curving around to a patio in back. The yard, lush with vegetation, impressed Chris as being very deep. She wanted to look more closely at the yard, but her attention was held by a woman sitting at the table on the patio and watching their approach.

"Chris, this is Sue Beamish. Sue, Chris McCaleb," Dawes made the introductions when they arrived at the table. 

Sue's smile froze for an instant, then spread. "Doctor McCaleb?"

Chris realized Sue was now making the connection. Yes, she thought, I am the notorious anti-feminist who fired your friend. She reached out her hand rather than speak her thoughts, and hearing Dawes chuckle next to her helped her continue to smile.

"Well, have a seat, Doctor!" Sue pressed Chris' hand warmly. "Anybody who insists this daredevil use her brains as well as her guts is a friend of mine. Deidre," Sue called toward the door from which breakfast aromas were tantalizingly drifting. "D is here with her friend." Sue turned back to the two of them as they took their seats at the table, "She's going to love this!"

Chris wondered how Sue meant that, but she winked at Chris with a big smile that seemed genuinely delighted. 

Dawes was smiling as well as she filled their juice glasses from a pitcher on the table. She explained to Chris, "Deidre saw you once at the hospital and was very taken with you." Sue nodded agreement. "When she heard I worked with you, she wanted to know if you were available. She was disappointed that you were already with someone, because she wanted me to develop a relationship with you."

"Is she psychic?" Chris asked Dawes.

"Sometimes I wonder," Sue responded, then frowned toward the door. "I'll bet she's still on the phone with Heppert. Let me go get her."

"No, Sue, sit down," Dawes waved at her. "Heppert probably isn't coming down and needs her morning dose of Deidre to get her through."

"You may be right," Sue grinned, then winked. "She may not have slept well last night."

"Oh, god, I did not think of that..." Dawes looked truly stricken.

Sue leaned toward Dawes, laughing, "You never do at the time, do you?"

"This one I'll explain later, Chris," Dawes murmured, not quite looking at Chris' questioning eyes.

A clattering of dishes could be heard from within, at which Sue jumped up, exclaiming, "Breakfast!" and ran to the door in time for Deidre and a rolling tray laden with four full plates to emerge. Chris started to get up to help when she noticed the cane and Deidre's struggling gait. Dawes' squeeze of her hand and wordless smile let her know it wasn't necessary.

As Deidre was concentrating on getting the rolling tray through the door with Sue's help, Chris used the opportunity to see if she could recognize her. When Deidre turned toward them and smiled, Chris was sure she hadn't met her. She'd not likely have forgotten that face, that smile. Deidre was strikingly beautiful.

Deidre's hand went to her mouth, but not enough to cover the happiness on her lovely face as she looked from Chris to Dawes and back at Chris again. "Dr. McCaleb?" She laughed delightedly, then walked over to Chris and put our her hand. "I'm so glad to finally see you two together!"

"That's what Dawes tells me," Chris said. "Were you a patient at the hospital?"

"Yes, but you wouldn't remember--you never saw me," Deidre spoke over her shoulder as she walked back to her chair and sat. "Let's all start eating, before it gets cold." 

"Won't Heppert be joining us?" Dawes asked.

"No," Deidre smiled, "Heppert has a date with Margaret!"

Sue and Dawes looked at each other in amusement, while Deidre gave Chris a look something like a plea for tolerance.

"Heppert," Dawes explained, "lives on the third floor, above ... us?" She looked to Chris, apparently asking for permission. Chris laughed and nodded, and Dawes continued. "Heppert has fallen desperately in love with a woman named Margaret, a researcher who works at the same company Heppert works for. But nobody--not even Heppert--knows if Margaret is a lesbian."

"If she isn't, she ought to be," Sue said to her toast, and took a bite.

"You think every woman should be," Deidre said, leaning toward Sue.

"It would bring more order to the universe," Sue said, straightening her spine and speaking with an air of pomp, offset by a distended cheekful of toast.

"It would bring more order to Heppert's mind," Dawes brought them back to the subject.

"Has anybody asked Margaret if she is?" Chris asked.

"Too easy," Deidre smiled across the table to her.

"Heppert doesn't want to scare her off," Sue explained, her face back to normal dimensions since swallowing.

"So they remain perpetual friends," Dawes concluded.

"And Heppert remains perpetually tense," Sue grinned at Dawes.

"Which is why you think she may not have slept well last night?" Chris asked Dawes. "If Sue and Deidre could hear us, surely Heppert could also."

"Leave it to a doctor to get right to the point," Deidre observed. "Yes, it's got to be frustrating for Heppert to know the rest of the world is ..."

"Consummating?" Sue offered from the midst of her eggs.

Deidre and Dawes looked first at each other, then at Sue. The silence caused Sue to look up from her plate.

"Please go on," Sue said. "I'll try not to interrupt anymore."

"Living with a writer can't be easy for you," Dawes said softly, patting Deidre's hand. "You could have had me, you know."

"I was saving you for Dr. McCaleb." Deidre turned to Chris and continued, "Heppert is just taking her time with Margaret, as I think she should, considering they're both basically rather shy. They're becoming good friends and, although I know I'm going to be sorry saying this in front of these two hedonists, plenty of people maintain very loving relationships without sharing sex."

"Not when one of them is as horny as Heppert," Sue mumbled, again into her eggs. 

Dawes grinned delightedly at Sue, who continued to concentrate on her breakfast, apparently oblivious of her effect around the table. Chris managed to sober a little as Deidre caught her eye.

"Yes," Deidre continued to Chris, "I knew I'd be sorry."

"Tell me how you knew me from the hospital," Chris offered to change the subject.

"I saw you working with a child called Lissy. Do you remember her?"

Chris nodded, it had been three or four years before, during her internship.

"No one could do anything with her. She was in the hospital when I was there for my second big bout in Madison. MS," Deidre held her palms open before her in explanation. Chris nodded, having wondered if she were observing a multiple sclerosis patient in remission.

Deidre continued, "They would bring her into physical therapy every day about the same time I was there. She had seizures, didn't she?" Deidre looked to Chris for confirmation, then continued, "But the seizures weren't the worst of it for the hospital staff and other patients. Her behavior was uncontrollable sometimes. She would bite, kick, behave terribly." Deidre leaned back in her chair while Sue refilled her coffee cup, then she continued.

"One day, I was in PT and they brought her in. She began to scream and fought to get away from the orderly. He was trying to control her without hurting her. The staff called for an intern, and you arrived. You went straight to her, and knelt in front of her as the orderly held her. She stopped kicking and looked at you. A nurse was standing behind you with a syringe, and I suddenly realized the child knew you were a doctor who would cause her to receive the drug that would calm her. She had started the tantrum, but now she could stop because you were there. I suspect she was addicted."

Chris nodded. She'd seen a lot of that.

"But you didn't have the nurse give it to her right away. You reached out and laid your hand against her head. I thought the child was going to cry, but suddenly her face changed to anger. She grabbed your hand and bit into your finger. She had your finger clenched between her jaws and I could see she was biting as hard as she could."

Chris could feel Dawes looking down at her hands, finding the right hand index finger, still scarred from those little teeth.

"You didn't pull away," Deidre continued, softly, speaking only to Chris. "You stayed kneeling before that child, looking right into her eyes, so sadly."

Chris could see that little head again in front of her, "It was as though the pain I was feeling wasn't mine, but hers. If I pulled away, she would have to feel it all by herself," Chris murmured, remembering.

"The nurse gave the injection to the child. It worked almost immediately. She sat like some normal, sleepy little thing and cuddled against you. And you let her stay right there, the two of you sitting on the floor together, while the nurse bandaged your finger."

"What ever happened to Lissy?" Dawes asked.

"She died," Chris answered, "in seizure."

They sat and looked in different directions for several minutes. Chris became aware of the voices of various species of birds in the verdant tent roof of treetops between them and the cloudless azure sky. The deep, narrow yard was heavily planted, despite the dense shade of several enormous old trees. Two bird feeders hung from lower branches, and one pole-mounted feeder stood between them, each being visited in rapid succession by cardinals, sparrows, goldfinches, and other varieties of small birds Chris couldn't name. Then five rather large, obnoxious blue and white birds swooped down on the feeders, squawking and threatening each other and any other birds attempting to land there.

"Blue jays," Sue said to Chris, following her attention to the noisy things. "The Republicans of the bird world."

Suddenly the jays startled off as a larger bird flew to the pole-mounted feeder. Chris guessed it was a woodpecker of some sort--it didn't perch, but hung from the rim of the feeder.

"Woodpeckers are the Democrats," Sue said softly to Chris, who looked again at the feeder and observed the smaller birds returning, seemingly unafraid of this much larger member of their kind. The smaller birds massed on the feeders and on the ground below while the woodpecker dipped her red-marked head periodically into the tray for another seed. The blue jays remained in the trees, scraping the air with their outraged cries, as the egalitarian woodpecker took her time feeding.

"The last eleven years have been very hard on Sue," Deidre smiled, patting her lover's hand.

"In 1980," Sue said, "I thought some monstrous irony had occurred to American voters--some anomaly of the system the "founding fathers" hadn't foreseen. Or maybe that in altering the system down through the years, we'd messed something up horribly so that a few greedos could cause one nut to get all the way through despite the fact that the majority of people didn't want that to happen."

"It never occurred to you that the American people might have gotten exactly what they had been asking for?" Dawes asked.

"Which was?" Chris joined in.

"A rich, white, male capitalist who would play cowboy and cavalryman with them and help them promote the myth that white Yanks had always fought and won holy wars. You know," Dawes shrugged, "the 1950's Hollywood version of history. Like some Hollywood producer so lavishly fabricated for the opening of the Summer Olympics in L.A. in the mid-eighties."

"All I remember from that is how nice for gay guys that they did that one extravaganza with all the pianos played only by men," Sue smiled.

"Don't you remember how neat and tidy was their representation of the conquering white hordes? The pioneer bit with the wagons and dancing settlers?" 

"Oh, god, yes," Sue stared at the air above the table, the scene apparently playing out before her eyes.

"See any native Americans getting herded, slaughtered, decimated by disease?" Dawes smirked.

"Only a bi-pod hybrid would have the vision to see it that way," Sue grinned at Dawes, "and even then only with hindsight. You couldn't possibly have seen much from Quebec in the early eighties. When Reagan was elected in 1980 you were, what? Eleven?"

"A very mature twelve," Dawes corrected her. "And I have told you before, we knew far more about what was happening here than Americans ever bother to learn about us. What did you call me?"

"A term I've been working on: bipod hybrid. You've got one foot in Quebec and one here, plus you're a blend of two races. The result is a creature with extra stability in shaky conditions and improved vision in murky atmospheres."

"I suspect," Deidre said, "it's your turn to be a character, D."

"Oh, terrific," Dawes turned to Chris who felt a little mentally out of breath trying to keep up with the conversation. "Sue has a habit of writing her friends into her novels. So far, only Deidre has come off decently." She turned back to Sue with, "Sounds like I'm going to be something out of that bar scene in 'Star Wars.' How many tentacles do I have, Susan?"

"I never discuss a work in progress," Sue laughed as she leaped out of her chair. "But I'll give you a few hints if you help with dishes, you swarthy swashbuckler. Grab them plates and follow me."

"Swashbuckler," Dawes whispered dismally as she collected the plates, then called to Sue who was already through the screen door, "I'm going to be a pirate with big, bugged-out eyeballs, right? Susan? What color are you going to make me?"

"Purple! Now shut up and bring those plates," Sue's voice came back from the kitchen with the sound of water filling the sink. 

"I don't want to be purple," Dawes complained to Deidre as she stacked the plates.

"Perhaps, darling," Deidre crooned, her eyes crinkling at the edges, "she'll make you lavender and very sexy."

"No," Dawes protested, striding for the door with plates and tableware, "I want to be black. Sue, can't I be black like Darth Vader?"

Deidre laid a hand on Chris' arm, preventing her from clearing more of the table. "They'll do it, Dr. McCaleb. Let's enjoy the chance to visit, can we?"

"If you call me Chris rather than 'Doctor'."

"I'd love to. I'm very agreeable today," Deidre laughed. "It was such a wonderful surprise to see you here with D."

"Frankly," Chris admitted, pouring more coffee for both of them, "it's still something of a surprise for me as well. We happened to be in the same place when it started to rain last night. Things just happened from there, though I understand now it would probably have happened somehow, eventually."

"Yes," Deidre agreed, raising her coffee cup to drink, her large, sea-green eyes peering over the rim at Chris. Long lashes, dark brown like her short-cropped hair, softened the effect of those crystalline eyes. Deidre lowered her cup, revealing a warm smile, and Chris wondered if this charming woman knew the effect she was having.

"I was just beginning to worry about D," Deidre confided. "She was getting restless, and with summer coming on, I was afraid she would go for something dangerous. You know, flying through forest fires, or such," she shrugged as though admitting the idea were far-fetched.

"She likes to take risks," Chris didn't believe Deidre was out of line at all.

"Yes, that's part of it--the part that's dangerous for her. The other part, of course, is that she's not afraid to die."

"Isn't that dangerous?"

Deidre smiled, more to herself Chris thought, before she responded. "Not necessarily. Sometimes it helps put things in perspective."

"I don't think she had things in perspective when she decided to land on that roof," Chris blurted out before she let Deidre's words completely sink in. When she realized the woman might have been talking about herself, she started to apologize.

"No," Deidre smiled and rested her hand on Chris' arm. "You are absolutely right. When D pulled that stunt, she was giving in to her love of danger. But she mustn't." She locked onto Chris' gaze. "You know that's how her father died? Making some sort of risky maneuver while dropping chemicals on a forest fire?"

"No." Chris looked away from Deidre's contact, to think. "I guess I don't know much at all about her background, except that her father taught her to fly, in Quebec. He was a draft dodger, an African-American, wasn't he?"

"Technically, he wasn't dodging the draft as much as he was protesting the war when he left the country. Apparently, you could avoid the draft back then by going to college or getting into certain trades. D's father wouldn't have been drafted; he was working on a degree in education at the University of Chicago. D says he told her he didn't want to fight in a white man's war to kill yellow people, or watch his black brothers die trying, and he refused to go to a white jail. So he drove to Canada the year before Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated."

"She doesn't talk about politics much," Chris mused. "But she obviously has her opinions, from what she said to Sue about Reagan. Still, I don't feel any anger in her. Is it possible to be the daughter of an exile and not be angry?"

"I think so," Deidre nodded. "It may have helped that he fell in love with and married a French Canadian woman soon after he arrived in Quebec."

"Dawes' mother?"

"Yes, a beautiful woman. D has a picture of her parents taken on their wedding day. Get her to show it to you--you'll see where she gets her high cheekbones and those long dimples!"

"She never spoke to me of her mother," Chris looked toward the kitchen door. The rattling of dishes was subsiding, they would be returning soon. "Is she still alive?"

"Yes, though they haven't seen each other since D's father's funeral. Her mother didn't want her to fly anymore, and since she controlled the company after her husband died, was in a position to forbid it--there, anyway. D left, came to the States--to Chicago--to live with her grandparents. But I don't think she holds any grudge against her mother. In fact, she feels quite sympathetic toward her. D said her mother and father loved each other very much, and she believes her mother agonized over losing him in a plane accident before it finally happened."

"She would never give up flying, though," Chris smiled, remembering the look on Dawes' face after particularly touchy rescue flights: pure energy pouring from those eyes, that bronze, smooth skin. She could sympathize with Dawes' mother, too, but would never want to take that look off that face.

"No," Deidre agreed, "she wouldn't give up flying. But I think she'll be willing to stay settled for awhile now."

Laughter, Sue's first then Dawes' joining, erupted from the kitchen. The two emerged pushing each other through the door.

"They are good for each other," Deidre said, leaning toward Chris so she could keep her voice low. "I'm so happy Sue has her for a friend."

As the two approached, Chris watched them beaming down at Deidre and thought perhaps they saw the combination differently: they obviously shared a sense of good fortune to have Deidre in their lives. Then, as she watched Sue bend to kiss Deidre, Chris felt Dawes at her side and looked up to see her laughing happily, looking down into her eyes.


	3. Heppert and Margaret

Heppert allowed herself to yawn at the stoplight. She had been pedaling for five blocks now, but still felt groggy. I'm really addicted to caffeine, she thought, imagining the taste, the smell, of a hot cup. She yawned again as the light turned green and she pushed off, slipped into her toe clips, and continued to follow the bike path around the lake. 

She'd been tempted to grab a cup of coffee with Sue and Deidre before leaving to meet Margaret, if only to find out what Olympic hopeful had been with Dawes all night. But it had been so hard to wake up this morning, she'd fallen back to sleep after her alarm went off, and overslept. She shook her head to eject the memory of how good her pillow had felt when she awoke spooning it. "Margaret," she'd murmured as she woke. Caffeine's not all I'm addicted to, Heppert thought.

After a mile she left the bike path and followed the wide boulevard leading toward the university. She enjoyed this ride on Sunday mornings, few cars and no trucks to contend with and the weather particularly perfect this spring morning. She wasn't sure, however, if she was ready for Margaret's brand of racquetball, even after warming up on the bike ride.

Heppert pulled up to the bike rack in front of the gym and locked hers next to Margaret's. She checked her watch and realized she would be a couple minutes late, but that was still good, considering how late she'd left the house.

The young woman at the desk recognized her as she walked in, and waved her through with, "Your partner's waiting at court four."

Heppert smiled and nodded, replaying the word 'partner' through her mind. "I wish," she murmured. She took the stairs down two at a time and ran to the locker room to stow her panniers.

"Sorry I'm so late!" Heppert called in through the little door to let Margaret know she was there before stepping in, to avoid a ricocheting ball. Heppert suspected Margaret played harder by herself than she did with her, from the velocity of the balls Heppert ducked whenever she arrived later than Margaret.

"That's okay," Margaret called back a little breathlessly, "gave me a chance to warm up. I'm moving a little slow this morning." She turned a wide smile to Heppert, who summoned the self-discipline not to stare. Margaret's face was flushed, her eyes and smile bright, her strong arms and legs even more apparent in shorts and tank top.

Heppert looked down to busy herself with pulling on her glove and slipping her hand through the string of her racquet.

"Everything okay?" Margaret had moved closer, and was looking intently into Heppert's face.

Oh, god, Heppert thought, but said, "Yeah, fine, I'm just really tired. I didn't sleep well, I guess."

"You haven't been for awhile lately, you know." Margaret reached up and brushed her fingers across Heppert's brow. "You do look tired, Rosemarie."

Heppert immediately responded with a smile and, "I need a vacation, I guess," just to cover the response in her body to that touch, those eyes. She wanted to savor it, so she moved away, her eyes directed to her gloved hand on the racquet but seeing Margaret's hand close to her face. "Maybe I just need you to run me around this court for an hour!" But I'd rather wrassle, she thought, as she felt the effect Margaret's presence always had on her.

Margaret responded with a grin and, "Okay, let's sweat it out of you, whatever it is. You serve?"

Three games later, a knock on the door let them know they'd played right up to the hour and someone was waiting to use the court. 

"Saved," Heppert said between pants. Margaret looked beat, too, despite the fact she'd won all three.

"You made me work," she said, and swatted Heppert's rear with her racquet as she pulled open the door.

They nodded to the man and woman waiting in the hall, and took turns at the water fountain. Heppert leaned against the wall and wiped her face with the bottom of her T-shirt as she watched Margaret drink.

"You have a gray hair," Heppert smiled as Margaret straightened and swallowed.

"These games are making me old," she gasped, and pulled her shirt out to wipe her face. "I have a lot of gray hairs. You're just noticing?" She laughed and poked lightly at Heppert's stomach with the head of her racquet.

"You do not. I only see one."

"Rosemarie, look!" Margaret tipped her head forward for Heppert's inspection and brushed her hand across the short-cropped hair at the crown.

Heppert seized the opportunity to touch that head, and ran her fingers through Margaret's hair. She did see more then, a just beginning salt-and-pepper effect of white against ebony. "Yes, there. That's going to look very distinguished, Margaret."

"'Distinguished,'" Margaret echoed, and smiled a long, steady look into Heppert's eyes. She liked it, Heppert thought. She liked my touching her. "C'mon, young-un," Margaret laughed. "Let's shower and get to breakfast. I'm hungry!"

Heppert followed her to the locker room with very mixed feelings. Margaret's locker was next to hers, Margaret would be naked next to her, and Heppert would, as always, shed her own soaked clothes with her eyes riveted to the insides of her locker, thankful for excellent peripheral vision. Margaret had beautiful breasts.

"You almost won that third game."

"What?" Heppert's mind had been busy blocking itself from functioning. She had turned to look, an automatic response to Margaret's voice, then had to struggle to keep her eyes confined to Margaret's face. It was impossible to ignore the slight flush on her skin produced by the exercise, the shower, and her energetic style of toweling off.

"Are you okay?" Margaret stopped scrubbing her head with her towel, and stood with her arm raised, the towel draped diagonally across her body down to her other hand resting on her hip. One breast was covered, one was not. Heppert still couldn't think of something to say. "You haven't said a word since you realized I have gray hair," Margaret teased.

"I'm thinking about breakfast," Heppert blurted. Like, maybe I could get something down if I swallow hard, she thought.

"I hope they have broccoli quiche," Margaret grinned.

"They should name it after you," Heppert laughed, grateful for safe territory. She stuck her head into her locker as Margaret stretched on tip-toe to reach the deodorant on her top shelf.

As they rolled up to the bike rack in front of The Warm Hearth, Margaret read the menu slate. "Broccoli quiche!"

"She wins three games and gets her favorite breakfast for free," Heppert growled as they locked their bikes together and to the rack.

"No, Rosemarie, I'm buying breakfast this morning. It's not fair you always buy."

"I always lose," Heppert laughed. She expected to lose the argument as well. 

"You're still learning the game," Margaret shook her head. "If we were playing soccer, I'd be buried in the mud."

"So, next Sunday, we'll play soccer," Heppert reached across the bikes and mussed the graying hair. Margaret quickly ran her fingers through and every short strand fell back into place as she shook her head. Heppert was tempted to try again, that head beckoned now, and Margaret was sending that same smiling look as she had at the water fountain.

"No way," Margaret shook her head again, "I only have so much square footage of leg. One of those bruises you get would cover a full limb on me."

As Heppert followed her into the restaurant, she realized Margaret did have shorter legs, but regained height through her torso. Margaret's head was only one or two inches below the level of Heppert's. After they were seated in a booth, they looked eye to eye. She could probably spoon me pretty easily, Heppert thought, then shook her head quickly.

"What was that about?" Margaret laughed, amused alarm on her face.

"Oh, nothing, a fly, I think," Heppert waved at the empty air in front of her nose.

"Hi, how are you this morning?" The young woman stood with coffee pot poised, smiling down at Heppert. Heppert knew her from one of Sue and Deidre's parties, but couldn't remember her name.

"Hi, I didn't know you worked here," Heppert said to let her know she recognized her, and nodded to indicate they both wanted coffee. Gina, Heppert remembered. Sue had called her Gina during one of her matchmaking fits. Heppert recalled Sue saying Gina was interested and suggesting she ask the young woman out.

"Just started last week. Annie's letting me work part-time until the semester is over, then I'll be full-time this summer when some of her student workers go home. You two look like you've been getting a workout. Did you bike here?" She poured full mugs and set one before Margaret and then one before Heppert, her attention focused on Heppert.

"After racquetball," Margaret nodded, then leaned conspiratorially toward her. "And I won all three games, so I'm buying."

"Gotcha," Gina laughed, "you get the check." She was obviously ignoring Heppert's attempt to regain her attention. She slipped two menus onto the table with, "I'll be right back."

"Smooth," Heppert smirked.

"The waitress?" Margaret's eyes smiled through the steam drifting past as she held her coffee mug to her lips and blew.

"No," Heppert was suddenly confused. "The way you arranged to pay. What do you mean, 'the waitress?'"

"I thought--oh, never mind," Margaret laughed, and waved the thought away with her menu. "I know what I want. How about you?"

Heppert blocked the natural response as she looked up from her menu at Margaret. She realized that being with her was becoming increasingly difficult, and the times in between even worse.

"Rosemarie?" Margaret asked softly, then her expression changed from a question to something that required her to directly return Heppert's gaze for a long moment. She broke that moment by looking quickly down at her coffee and lifting the mug to her lips.

Gina returned and took their order. When she had gone, they busied themselves with watching other women seated in the restaurant or who came in or went out, some of whom Heppert recognized and would nod to. Now and then a man would come in, but mostly the place belonged to the community of women who came there because they knew they would be surrounded by women like themselves. Heppert had brought Margaret there six months before, not as a test but as a statement, a quiet introduction. And Heppert had been buoyed by her appreciative response. 

Now they sat across from each other and experienced a growing distance. To quell a mild panic she felt threatening her stomach, Heppert began to speak of work to draw Margaret back by a different direction, something they safely shared. But Margaret still didn't join in easily.

"Let's not talk about work," she smiled.

"Is something wrong?" Heppert asked, then decided the question was too open, too dangerous. "At work?"

"I'm a little discouraged," Margaret continued to smile, but her eyes didn't match. She looked troubled.

"Your research? Don't research scientists hit snags all the time?"

"The research is going fine," Margaret said to the air between them as Gina returned with their meals. "Thank you."

"You're welcome," she responded, flashing a big smile at both of them, and left.

"So, why are you discouraged?" Heppert couldn't let it go.

"Oh, Rosemarie," Margaret sighed, played disinterestedly with the broccoli quiche, then looked up at the suffragette poster on the wall of rough brick next to them. "Why can't life be more simple?"

"It is simple. Life doesn't kill people. People kill people."

"What?" Margaret looked directly at her now, her eyebrows curving up at the center.

"Life is simple, but we create mazes of rules for how we should behave. Every time we start to do something, we have to stop and choose from a list of alternatives. Things our mothers said were okay to do, things our teachers said were okay, things our friends will say are okay. Then we have to decide if that's what we think is okay to do."

"Believe it or not," Margaret said, "I think we are talking about the same thing."

"Good. Now will you tell me what that is?"

"The research is going great," Margaret sighed, took a bite of the quiche, chewed, swallowed. "This is good."

"You don't want it to go well?"

"It is creating an ethical dilemma for me. You know, from the small production lots you grew for me, what I'm working on."

"An oral rabies vaccine." Heppert kept her voice low. PetLove Labs regularly warned employees that fierce competition demanded careful security, especially on new products. 

Margaret nodded and asked, "What possible use would it be?"

Heppert stopped mid-bite. "To inoculate dogs against rabies. You requested a supply of canine cell cultures for replicating the virus."

Margaret chuckled, "Relax, Rosemarie, you look like I'm telling you about a plot to infect Iranian males. Yes, it is simply that. To inoculate dogs against rabies."

"So where is the ethical dilemma?"

"We already have a rabies vaccine. In fact, we have numerous competitors who also have rabies vaccines. There are even two kinds available, like polio vaccines: modified live virus vaccines and killed virus vaccines."

Heppert nodded. She worked on the tissue culture team that produced those vaccines daily. "But those rabies vaccines are to be injected. This would be an oral vaccine. No needles. If you put it in a palatable base, the dogs eat it! Veterinarians would love it, wouldn't they?"

"Probably. It would be something new, something nobody else has. Several million dollars in research would justify setting an enormously high profit margin per dose, it would grab attention and make PetLove look as though they were doing innovative research. Sales reps could sell it to veterinarians by appealing to their need to impress clients, "up" their image. And while they're selling this new toy, this gimmick, the sales reps can make package deals on other vaccines. Get the vets to buy more PetLove products, maybe convert them from other companies' products."

"Market share," Heppert nodded. That's what PetLove's management was always pushing in the employee newsletter: the concept of getting a bigger piece of the pie. That's why PetLove was starting to develop more vaccines and pharmaceuticals that other companies already had, so the company could offer its customers a whole line of animal health products, not just the special vaccines or pharmaceuticals that only PetLove's researchers had developed and no one else had.

Margaret nodded. "Do you know the cost of this particular thrust to gain market share?"

"You said 'millions'."

"That's the monetary cost, Rosemarie. Do you know how many dogs I'll be infecting with rabies to test the vaccine?"

Heppert stared at Margaret's stricken expression. She tried to remember what she had once read about the government requirements to assure "potency, safety, and efficacy" of a vaccine. In production, they never had to deal with that. Sterility tests were done in test tubes and petri plates, cells came from huge quantities of neatly labeled vials stored months, even years before, in deep freezers. Those vials themselves were filled with cells in solution which were generations away from the original animal. 

When they needed more cells, they pulled a couple of vials from one of the freezers, gently thawed them, and placed a fraction of the solution in a large container of nourishing fluid. Then that fluid was dispensed into specially treated glass containers which were incubated, and the cells reproduced exponentially, feeding on the rich media, forming colonies of tissue--microscopically thin, skin-like layers adhering to the inside walls of the glass bottles.

That new generation of cells, when ready, would be dispensed into a large quantity of vials for freezing and storing, each vial another potential vaccine lot. They were a long way from the days of "sacrificing" an animal for cells to infect with virus in order to make vaccine.

"In the rabies challenge test required for approval of a rabies vaccine, unvaccinated 'control' dogs must die of the disease, while vaccinated dogs in the same test must survive." Margaret said quietly. "I can't even euthanize the unvaccinated dogs once they show symptoms. They must die of the disease."

Heppert looked down at her hands. She didn't want to look at Margaret or see the image forming in her mind of caged dogs suffering through days of agony while Margaret stood by and watched.

"And that's just the toll for the first time I succeed in protecting the vaccinated dogs. Before I determine the right dosage, I'll be infecting the vaccinated as well as the controls, however many tries it takes."

Margaret's voice had dropped to a whisper, as though she were losing strength to speak. Heppert looked up, expecting she might see Margaret in tears, but she stared dry-eyed. Margaret looked simply angry.

"Would it be justified," Heppert asked slowly, trying to decide an answer before she allowed the question to be spoken, "if the vaccine was needed?"

Margaret's face softened, she pressed her lips together. "I can't begin to answer that now. I'm still struggling with this one."

"What I mean is," Heppert continued, searching for something to make it better, "what if the vaccine is used to vaccinate wild animals? We know raccoons and squirrels get rabies. What if it's sold to state health departments, left out in the woods in bait to be eaten by wild animals? Couldn't that lower the infection rate, maybe even get rid of rabies in some places all together?"

"What's to control the dosage? Which animals eat how much of the bait laced with the vaccine? And you're talking about spreading a modified live virus into the wild with no control," Margaret said gently, but immediately. Heppert suspected she'd already walked around this corner a long time ago. 

"How can we know," Margaret continued, "whether the vaccine is even effective in species other than dogs, unless we test those other species as well? We're talking hundreds of millions in research money now, dear, not to mention even more animals having to die with rabies in order to prove the vaccine would be effective in members of their species."

"What if there's a rabies epidemic in the wild? Wouldn't it be a good thing to have this vaccine available?" Heppert knew this was stretching.

"Bullets are far cheaper than doses of vaccine," Margaret responded flatly.

They both looked down at their plates. Why did everything always come down to money, Heppert thought.

"I'm sorry," Margaret said softly reaching across the table to tenderly squeeze Heppert's arm. "I knew when I started questioning this that I shouldn't talk about it. It's my problem. I'll work it out."

"What will you do?" Heppert really wanted to ask, what will we do?

"I'm still working on that part."

"More coffee?" Gina asked a little sheepishly, apparently feeling she might be interrupting. Margaret looked to Heppert who shook her head. Margaret shook her head and smiled as well.

"Shall I leave the check?" Gina asked, and handed the ticket to Margaret before leaving their table.

"I not only ruin your breakfast, but I depress your friend as well," Margaret apologized.

Heppert looked down at the tip Margaret left as they rose to leave. "I think you've more than made it up to her."

"How do I make it up to you?" Margaret said over her shoulder as Heppert followed her out of the restaurant.

Oh, god, Heppert thought.

They unlocked their bikes from the rack outside the restaurant, and Heppert waited, hoping.

"Let's ride for awhile through the park," Margaret suggested. "Do you have time?"

No, I'm due home in ten minutes to curl up with my pillow. "All day," she shrugged, trying for an air of nonchalance that would override her need to scream.

She wondered, aware of Margaret's strong back hunched over her handlebars as they rode next to each other, if this would be the chance to talk about her feelings. Perhaps they could stop along the way. Or would that seem callous, considering what Margaret was grappling with right now?

Seem callous? Heppert yelled at herself, how much more selfish could she get? Margaret was trying to work out a problem that threatened to sink her career, and someone masquerading as her friend was about to drop another thirty-ton piece of trouble on her deck.

A horn blew, brakes squealed, and someone screamed, "Shit!" Heppert realized the scream had been hers, and the horn and squeal had come from a car whose bumper sat six inches from her left leg.

"Oh, Rosemarie."

She looked back to see Margaret clutching her stomach. She mouthed, "Sorry," to the driver, who shook his head angrily, then she dismounted and pushed her bike back to the crosswalk where Margaret waited. She glanced up at the signal and wondered if her face was as red as the light she'd just rolled through.

"I'm sorry, Margaret, I wasn't paying attention. Are you all right?"

Margaret took a deep breath, and her color seemed to improve slightly. "I am never telling you about a problem of mine again."

I hate me. "I wasn't exactly thinking about your problem, Margaret."

"Small consolation. Besides, if you were now a permanent discoloration in the asphalt, I would never have known that, Rosemarie."

"Never happen," Heppert held up a shock of her hair. "Redheads have their own, personal leprechauns riding on their shoulder."

"Yours just blinked," Margaret laughed, and poked her lightly in the stomach. Then she smiled, sending a look that Heppert wanted to curl up on a rainy day with. "Be careful?"

Only if you'll marry me. "Promise," Heppert said, and nodded.

They spent three hours pedalling around the lakes, taking breaks to walk or sit and simply watch all the people drawn there by the new warmth of the sun. Finally, they sat with their backs against a retaining wall.

"This is a beautiful day," Heppert said, her eyes closed, head tilted back to catch the full strength of the sun's glare.

"It is. I wish it wouldn't end," Margaret murmured.

"Does it have to?"

"Yes. I've been putting it off, but I have to go home and do some planning for a meeting tomorrow."

"I thought we were spending so long in the park because you were reluctant to let me get back out into traffic."

Oh, god, there's that smile again.

"I'm not worried about that. You promised you'd be careful," Margaret reminded her, "and I know you're not the kind of person to break a promise.

"I'll take the bus."

"You'd start daydreaming and miss your stop."

Not unless they've started handing out pillows to their riders. I've got to stop this.

"Rosemarie? Where do you go when you look like that?"

Have you ever ridden a roller coaster, Margaret? You know the feeling at the summit, just before the descent, when the top of your head flies open?

"Hard to describe. I think it has something to do with Irish genes." Tell her, dammit. She's asking you what's going on. "What meeting do you have to plan for?" A cloud passed over, somewhere between them and an absolutely clear sky. "It has to do with your problem, doesn't it?"

"We're not going to talk about that anymore," Margaret declared, and rose to reach for her bike.

Damn.

"Margaret, I'm sorry. Come on, I'll spring for ice cream," Heppert offered from where she continued to sit on the ground. If I don't get up, will she stay?

"No, but thanks. I really do have to get home." Margaret began to fit her feet into her toe clips. Heppert scrambled up and grabbed her bike.

"I need some more exercise, I'll ride with you to your place, then home."

Margaret hesitated, then smiled. "Thank you, Rosemarie. I'll appreciate the company."

Not quite the response I would give my soul for. "Sure."


	4. Past and Future Love

Heppert dismounted at the gate by the driveway, rolled her bike through and up the drive to the old carriage house, which now served as a garage. One door stood ajar, and she noticed Sue and Dawes' bikes were gone as she hung hers.

"Hep?" Deidre's voice drifted over the solid divide of the privacy fence as Heppert shut the garage door. She found Deidre filling the birdbath.

"Sue and Dawes went for a ride?"

Deidre's sideways grin and raised eyebrow was her Inspector Clousseau look.

"I 'ave information, mon Capitaine."

"What?"

"Play along, Hep, or I'll hose you down."

"I think that's considered the appropriate therapy for my condition."

"Oh, Hep. It didn't go well? You've been gone all day," Deidre redirected the stream of water as the cement saucer overflowed. Heppert followed her to the spigot to help roll the hose. "Somehow I thought this day would be special for you."

"Well, if you consider almost causing an accident 'special,' I guess it was that kind of day."

"What happened?" Deidre was looking her over, probably counting limbs.

"Nothing, I just kept going at a red light because I was thinking about what I wanted to say to Margaret which, as usual, never got said." Somehow all the good parts of the day were lost in that one, miserable fact. "No one was hurt, unless the driver has a stroke later thinking about it. And Margaret may be one fright closer to an ulcer, if she has a tendency that way."

She dropped down into a chair on the patio, and thought of Margaret, hand on her stomach. Then, her "Be careful" look. The vision faded to reveal Deidre, smiling from the chair next to hers.

"Something nice happened," Deidre observed. "You didn't get that look on your face terrorizing Sunday drivers."

"Sometimes she looks at me, Deidre, and I know she really cares about me. But, ever since I met her, one thing is in my head and something completely different comes out of my mouth."

"Still, you're better than Sue was when I first met her in Chicago. She had trouble getting anything out of her mouth."

"Susan?"

Deidre grinned and nodded, put an index finger to her lips, and angled her head toward the house. "Not so loud, she's in there working at her desk."

"I thought she went riding with Dawes."

"No, D's friend borrowed her bike, so she and D could go to the park."

"Who was Dawes with last night? Anybody we know?"

"Sort of." Deidre flashed her green eyes. Heppert decided she believed even Sue's data could be erased by that level of energy.

"Woman, you are charged this day. Who?"

"Dr. Chris McCaleb," Deidre whispered, drawing out the sounds. Now Heppert understood.

Still, she couldn't resist. "So," Eyebrows raised, jaw loosened, stupid mood set to medium-high, "Will Dawes get her job back now?"

"No wonder you were so eager to help me put the hose away." She held her cane, batter-up style, and laughed.

"Okay, I'll bite harder. Is Dawes in love?"

"I would say, D has been in love, and so has Chris. They just finally got together."

"The 'big bang' theory," Heppert nodded, pursing her lips to prevent grin muscles taking over.

"I do love you, Rosemarie Heppert, and I am reminding myself of that fact at this moment," Deidre mumbled from behind her hands.

"Let me see those eyes when you say that, and I'm yours," Heppert implored, pulling gently on Deidre's wrists. Deidre lowered her hands, caught Heppert's, and squeezed.

"Hep, if only you could speak that clearly to Margaret!"

"Maybe it's not meant to be," Heppert shrugged wearily, got up and walked to the edge of the patio.

"Don't even waste seconds thinking that," Deidre said. The sureness in her voice pulled Heppert around to face her again. "Not many people get to feel the way you do, dear. And there's probably a reason why this is so hard for you."

"You really believe that. You believe in destiny, Deidre?"

She stared down at her hands in her lap. "Something, I don't know. I just feel, Hep, so strongly about certain people. You're one of those people," she shrugged helplessly, and smiled.

"You're worse than an Irish grandmother," Heppert stared incredulously. "A WASP who gets vibrations!"

"And then, at other times, I feel Margaret shouldn't be required to put up with the likes of you."

They grinned at each other for a long moment. Heppert found herself wishing she'd known Deidre before she'd become ill. How had she walked--long, vigorous strides or smooth, fluid motions? Her broad shoulders and strong arms were the base of a lovely sculpture at the table.

Heppert walked back to her chair. "So, how did Sue finally manage to speak to you?"

"I slid into home, knocking myself unconscious on the catcher's knee. When I came to, Sue was holding me in her arms." Deidre's smile was more on one side of her face than the other. "I thought she was going to kiss me, or say something I didn't want others to hear. I could see the official looking down at me from over Sue's shoulder, and I blurted, 'I was safe, right?' Sue laughed," her face lit at the memory. "You know that wonderful, happy laugh of hers."

Heppert nodded, "It's a lot like that wonderful, happy laugh of yours."

"When you've lived together almost twenty years, you tend to share behaviors, I guess."

"How long after you met was that?"

"A couple months. I told you how we'd met? Sue fighting with that chain snatcher?"

"On the El, coming home one night after class at U. of I.," Heppert recalled. "Sue jumped him, to stop him from yanking a gold chain off a woman's neck, and the guy cut her arm with a pop top. Sue gave me her 'Evils of Marketing-Oriented Packaging' speech when I asked her about the scar one day."

"Yes," Deidre nodded. "It's been a great ice-breaker at parties."

"And," Heppert continued, "when the train stopped, Sue chased him off. That was right by Cook County Hospital and you were a nurse on duty in the ER."

"I thought she might have lost enough blood to need a transfusion. She'd wrapped her jacket around her arm like a bandage, and there was quite a lot of blood as I unwrapped it. What really concerned me, though, was the way Sue stared and seemed to have trouble answering my questions."

"I found Dr. Alleston and asked her to come in and check Sue. I was glad later that she was available. She was quite special, a very down-to-earth, intuitive woman, and kind. My life had been so white when I got there, I'd have been totally ineffective if it hadn't been for her. I knew no Spanish, and I barely understood the many Black dialects I was hearing, much less references patients made to things in their lives I'd never heard of. She was Black, had grown up in that tough stretch of Chicago's west side. She seemed to accept my ignorance as a temporary condition, without judging. She didn't wait for me to ask, just started teaching."

Heppert could imagine how Deidre, as a young nurse, must have struck an older woman; even then, Deidre could have melted cultural barriers. She thought of what it would be like to meet a straight woman like Deidre: open, caring, intelligent. I'd be willing to answer all the unasked questions such a woman might have, she thought. What if Margaret is straight?

"When we came back into the cubicle, Sue was dozing on the gurney. Dr. Alleston asked her to sit up. She opened her eyes, said, "Hmm?" but just lay there. I asked her if she could sit up, and she came up so fast, she almost fell off. Dr. Alleston caught her, and told her that was a little too fast to be moving. She asked Sue how she felt."

"Sue kept looking at me, as though I had asked the question. Her answers were mostly more mumbles, 'I'm, um, fine.' Dr. Alleston agreed we might be looking at excessive blood loss, and asked me to round up a pack of Sue's blood type and an intravenous setup."

"When I got back, and was getting the equipment together just outside the cubicle, I could hear the two of them having a pretty reasonable conversation in there. As soon as I came in through the curtain, though, Sue's voice trailed off in the middle of a sentence. She seemed to lose her whole train of thought, and she just stared." Deidre smiled to herself, remembering.

"Dr. Alleston cancelled the blood, and suggested we probably didn't need to give Sue a local anesthetic before we started to stitch her up either, considering her condition," she laughed. "Heppert, I was blushing, probably as red as you get sometimes," she teased.

"It wasn't just that this handsome, young woman was so blatantly attracted to me, or even Dr. Alleston's observing it--of all people, I was probably most comfortable with her being there," Deidre gazed into Heppert's eyes to make a point. "It was something I was feeling, in return. But I didn't have time, or the inclination, to think about it. We stitched Sue's arm, jabbed her with a tetanus and antibiotics, and sent her on her way."

"Pretty cold, Ice Princess," Heppert snarled.

"Not entirely, defensive probably," Deidre laughed. "I recognized Susan at the Forest Park softball field the following Tuesday evening. I'd noticed on her chart that she lived in the same suburb I did, so I assumed she was there because she played ball, or knew somebody who did. I found out later she was there to find me. She'd overheard another nurse talking to me about our game schedule, while she was phoning her roommates from the ER desk."

"I walked up behind her, and asked her how her arm was," Deidre continued. "She turned, saw it was me, and locked up again. It was terrible! I practically carried the whole conversation, if you could call it that, myself. Finally, it was time for my game to start, and I left her standing there at the backstop. I ran off to the dugout, and when I looked back, I saw her bang her head against the mesh."

Heppert scratched her head, "I know the feeling, but I can't imagine Sue knowing it."

"She really hasn't changed that much, dear, even though that was seventeen years ago." Deidre looked off across the yard, but Heppert imagined she was seeing a hot, dusty softball field on a summer evening.

"After the first inning, I couldn't see Sue anywhere around the field. The next Tuesday evening, though, she was standing at the backstop again when I arrived. As I approached I called, 'You didn't miss much of a game. We lost.' She actually said, 'By much?'"

"Well," Deidre laughed at Heppert who was shaking her head. "It was a start, Hep. We managed to exchange some information. I found out Sue hadn't stayed because she had classes at the U. of I. on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, in English. I asked her if she wanted to teach, and she said no, it was just what she was best at."

"I said, 'You're kidding.'"

"Deidre, you didn't."

"Sue stared at me while it sank in, then burst out laughing. She said, 'Writing, damn it, not speaking it.' I still didn't get it. I said, 'What's the difference?' She said, without looking at me, 'If I were writing this conversation, I wouldn't be trying to think and looking into your eyes at the same time.'"

"Go for it, Susan," Heppert laughed.

"The gates didn't fly open right after that, but it was a pretty loud squeak," Deidre grinned. "At least, it left me obviously flustered, which put us on a somewhat equal footing for a bit. I managed to let Sue know that we also played on Friday nights. She was there, of course, the next Friday night, and every Friday night after. Luckily, it was on a Friday night that I threw my feet up in the air, to begin my slide home, and don't remember anything until I woke up with Sue's face very close to mine."

"We made love that night," Deidre looked into Heppert's eyes, then looked away, smiling. "I had to go out and buy a new uniform the next day."

"Not," Heppert stopped and cleared her throat, began again. "Not because you destroyed it sliding into home plate."

"No, dear, that only got it dusty." Deidre reached over and held her hand. "Sometimes, when feelings are so intense, something big has to happen to jar everything loose. I don't want you to be long-suffering, Hep, but don't give up either."

"I don't think I could if I wanted to."

"No," Deidre agreed. Those eyes, Heppert thought. "I think you're right about that."

* * *

The next evening, after work, Heppert knocked lightly on Margaret's door, and rehearsed her opening line.

"Hi, are you okay?" She actually wanted to say I love you, let's just move away and live together somewhere, but reminded herself that would be childish, self-serving, and totally irrelevant.

"Yes," Margaret sighed and opened the door wider for Heppert to enter the apartment. "I'm okay. I was prepared for their reaction. I didn't really expect them to understand."

"What was their reaction?" Heppert asked, kicking off her shoes and sitting on the floor for Alex, purring loudly, to help himself to her lap.

"Let's just say, predictable." Margaret smiled ruefully, watching Alex blissfully butting his head against Heppert's chin.

"Margaret," Heppert insisted, wrapping her arms around Alex partly to hold him still so she could speak and partly to give herself something to hold on to so she wouldn't reach for Margaret. "If you can talk about it, I'd like to listen."

Margaret sat on the floor facing her, and Alex dove for the more familiar lap. In a lighter moment, they had observed that Margaret's comfortable chairs and sofa were reserved for high altitude visitors and for Alex when everyone else was gone. Margaret and Heppert were both more comfortable at lower altitudes.

"They were, of course, shocked when I suggested we should cancel the project. They just sat and looked at me as though I were babbling. Maybe, after awhile, I was." Margaret looked into Alex's eyes and smiled, but Heppert could see she'd been crying.

"Oh, Margaret, you are right. Don't let them make you doubt yourself. You're not crazy, the system is."

"I keep telling myself that," Margaret laughed, ran her hand through her hair, and pushed her head back to flex the muscles of her neck and shoulders against her fist. "Down through history, certain individuals have been labeled insane or even heretical only to be vindicated by later generations. Somehow, though, I suspect I'm not such an epic-sized character, Rosemarie. What I do won't really make a difference to anyone but me."

"And me," Heppert murmured, as Alex moved back into her lap.

"And you," Margaret whispered, answering Heppert's look with a soft smile and a gentle swipe across Heppert's forehead to replace her bangs.

Oh, god, Heppert thought, but said, "So what do we do now?"

Margaret smiled sadly, and Alex immediately switched. "You, my dear friend, go back in to work tomorrow and say nothing. No one knows that you and I have even discussed this, correct?"

Heppert frowned, but nodded.

"It's important that it stay that way, Rosemarie."

"Why?"

Margaret looked into her eyes, blinked, then looked away. "I must resign. And I don't want you involved in it."

"I don't understand, Margaret. People know we're," Heppert hesitated, and Margaret glanced at her. Heppert waved both hands between them, "close friends. They'll expect we've discussed your feelings before resigning."

"If you maintain that we haven't, Rosemarie, then you won't be tempted to take my side in it. They think I'm crazy, dear. It could become difficult for you."

"So, maybe they'll ship me off to a gulag?" Heppert scoffed.

"Dr. Branley took me aside after the meeting and suggested I was suffering from menopausal hysteria. That's the degree to which they see my opinion as off-base. I don't want you to lose your job because of me."

Heppert stared at the woman before her. She took a deep breath to clear some of the emotion out before she could speak. "Margaret, how can you think I'd want to work there after this?"

"Rosemarie," Margaret said softly, "this is my fight."

"Margaret," Heppert growled, feeling heat rising around her eyes, "don't do this to me!"

Alex leapt from Margaret's lap to the chair behind her, and stared, ears back, at Heppert. Margaret rose and paced to the window.

After a moment, she turned back to face Heppert. "You don't understand. You simply must not be involved."

The tone of Margaret's voice, the resolve in her expression, stirred a fiber of fear once around Heppert's inside.

"Margaret, help me understand. What don't you want me involved in?" When Margaret didn't answer, Heppert insisted, "Tell me, or I'll go to Branley tonight and tell him you're hatching some kind of mad plot."

Margaret stared at her, then relaxed and smiled, "No, you wouldn't. I know you better than that. Rosemarie, you're bluffing."

"I won't let you do whatever it is you're planning to do on your own. I," their eyes locked, but Heppert searched for an alternative. "I am going with you, especially if it means you're leaving Madison. And if you try to leave without me, I'll do whatever it takes to stop you."

Margaret sank into the middle cushion of her sofa. "Oh, lord. Maybe I should just forget the whole thing."

Heppert began a sigh of relief, then checked herself. She crawled across the carpet to Margaret's knees, and smiled up into her dejected face. "Nice try, Margaret. But I'm not buying it."

Irritation dashed across Margaret's lips, straightening them. "Damn it, Rosemarie. I'm trying to protect you. Maybe I am crazy. Why should your life be ruined because I'm going off the deep end?"

"Just tell me what your plan is," Heppert reasoned. "If it's that bad, maybe I'll back out."

Margaret stared silently at Heppert for a very long while. Finally, she shrugged and crouched forward over her knees. "My research has gone far enough for the rest of the team to continue without me. They could start the rabies challenge tests next week. Twenty dogs have been chosen and grouped in the isolation area. There's only one way to stop them."

"Destroy the vaccine?"

"No," Margaret shook her head. "They'd just make more. The seed virus is locked in the high-security containment freezer. Branley and Naiper each have a key, and both must be used simultaneously to unlock it."

"What?"

"It was Branley's idea. He saw it in Hunt for Red October--he's quite the security nut." Margaret chuckled, "Maybe not so nuts, eh?"

Heppert shrugged. "So, what can we do?"

"I can't believe I'm telling you this."

"You trust me. You need me." You love me, dammit, admit it.

"Take the dogs."

Heppert blinked. Oh, god. She's not thinking straight. "Margaret, they'll just get more."

Margaret laughed, threw up her hands. "You're right. It would never work."

They stared at one another. Then Heppert slammed her fist into the cushion next to Margaret.

"Damn you, Margaret, stop playing with me!" She choked, her throat hot from screaming, her face close to Margaret's.

Margaret, obviously shaken by the fury so close to her, continued to stare.

"You can't do this without me," Heppert whispered hoarsely. She cleared her throat.

"Would you like something to drink, Rosemarie?"

"Not tea, Margaret. Got any beer?"

"Yes," Margaret answered quietly, rose from the sofa, stepped over Heppert's legs, and went to the kitchen with Alex glued to her wake.

She returned with two beers in the foam holders they always used, and Heppert reached automatically for the green one. Margaret sat next to her on the floor, their backs against the sofa, and they popped the cans in unison. Heppert took a deep swallow. Margaret stared down at hers without drinking.

"I'm beginning to think I'm hurting you worse by not telling you. You've never been angry with me before."

"You've never hurt me before."

"Oh, Rosemarie, I'm sorry." Tears dribbled down Margaret's cheeks. One plinked onto the top of her beer can, and Alex sniffed curiously. Margaret raised the can to her lips just as Heppert turned toward her, having decided to wrap her arms around Margaret and comfort her. Damn, she thought.

"They can't get another twenty dogs for some time," Margaret said when she'd lowered the can.

"Why not?"

"You know how they breed their own dogs, so they can make that weird justification of using them for testing: 'These dogs aren't pets, they were bred specifically for laboratory use.'"?

"Yeah, very logical argument."

"It had been so long since they needed a group like that, they had let their breeding program practically stop. Then two of their four bitches died within months of each other, of unknown causes. They spent weeks investigating, came up with nothing, but decided it was time to get new blood into the program. When they tried to order a new breeding group, it was right at the time when that animal rights group had managed to get an injunction against all laboratories in the country procuring animals. The injunction didn't tie things up for long, but long enough that we had to settle for these twenty dogs, the last of the old lot. Test dogs from the new group won't be available for almost a year."

Before Heppert had a chance to point out the flaws in Margaret's logic, she rose and walked to her desk.

"And even if they decide to get twenty dogs from somewhere else to continue the project," she said, taking an envelope out of the center drawer and holding it up for Heppert to read the address, "the radical act of a loony researcher that involves stealing twenty dogs will be a fun topic for the evening news."

"You think the publicity will stop them?"

"I'm including photos of some of the dogs. When people see their faces, the dogs will cease to be property and become real, living creatures. Turning public opinion against PetLove might make them reevaluate their sales projections, which would lower the expected profit margin compared to the large research expenditure. Plus, some of the parent company's stockholders will be upset, to say the least. And remember that animal rights actor who did the television commercials kicking off last year's new product promotion? She'll be livid when it's revealed she's promoted a company that infects dogs with rabies for the sheer profit of it."

"That's in there?" Heppert pointed to the envelope.

"All of it is in here," Margaret smiled, pulled out another envelope addressed to yet another local news outlet, and another, "and in here, and here."

"What, no video?"

"I couldn't sneak a video camera in and out as easily as I did my pocket camera."

"Margaret, how are you going to sneak twenty dogs out? Where are you going to go? Do you realize you'll go to prison if you're caught?" Heppert's heart sank as she witnessed Margaret's complacent resolve unmelted. "Woman, if you're not caught, you'll remain a fugitive."

"I'm leaving the country, Rosemarie. And I'm not coming back."

Heppert finished her beer and wanted another. The depth of these waters was treacherous, and Heppert panicked in water over her nose. She'd never considered giving up her citizenship, running from the law, the good guys, for the rest of her life. She thought of her mother, still back in New Jersey, finally enjoying life now that Heppert's father was dead. The woman is only fifty-two, Heppert thought. She could have twenty-five, thirty years of good times ahead of her, to make up for the lousy thirty she'd had with him. But her daughter, suspected of being a lesbian, has kidnapped twenty dogs and gone underground with a mad scientist, ignoring her mother's televised pleas to give herself up and resume going to Mass every Sunday.

"That's why I want you to stay here, Rosemarie." Margaret smiled just a little, stepped over to the sofa and dropped softly to the floor next to her. She wrapped an arm around Heppert's bent leg and rested her chin on Heppert's knee. "I want to know you're okay, and that I did all the right things."

"It would have worked if you hadn't put your chin on my knee."

"What?"

"I'm going with you."

"Rosemarie..."

"I'm going with you. Shut up. We don't have time to argue, and it's not going to be easy to get those damned dogs out of the isolation area after hours when all the doors are alarmed and the guard can read on his console which one is being opened."

"I've figured all that out," Margaret stammered.

"Good. We'll have to do it tomorrow night. They could decide any day that you shouldn't be there anymore. And I usually work late on Tuesdays. That will give me an excuse to be there after regular hours."


	5. The Request

Chris woke slowly in the midst of sorting through her dreams, with the understanding that she was searching for something. A white curtain waved from a dimly lit window, but she was drawn back to the images hovering behind her eyes, closer to her mind--Sue and Deidre enveloped by lush, emerald shadows, Deidre's green-ice eyes, Dawes. One image echoed, she and Dawes making love, wrapped together within a bubble of light-green fluid. Sliding together, buoyantly revolving in the soft luminescence, Chris drifted deeper into her dream.

The faint light from the window became Dawes' voice, moving the curtain in syllables. Chris reluctantly left the bubble to hear the light more clearly.

Dawes face was close, her eyes half-open and sleepy. "I was dreaming about you, Chris."

Chris pulled her over, and continued her dream in reality.

* * *

"Do you always awaken before dawn?" Dawes yawned on her way to the living room with the coffee. "We were up before the alarm yesterday morning, too."

"Left over from my med school regimen," Chris nodded, and waited for the sound of Dawes' jaw breaking as she exhaled. "You could stay in bed while I get up."

Dawes eased down onto the sofa, and smiled sleepily as she traced the outline of Chris' breast under her shirt. "Perhaps in the distant future, when waking next to you is no longer the fulfillment of a dream."

"Stay exhausted."

Dawes grinned, bent her head to kiss her breast. "Chris?"

"Mmm?"

"I do not want to move from here. I need to stay close by Sue and Deidre."

"Yes, they may be needing us."

"You would give up your apartment?"

Chris shrugged. "You saw yesterday when we went by for my clothes, it's practically empty now, anyway. I gave most of the furniture to Ellen. I've always thought of it as hers, since I bought most of it after she moved in. Come to think of it, she was stuck with the job of picking it out--I was always too busy to shop with her."

Dawes smiled, closed her eyes, and nuzzled Chris' hair.

"What?" Chris whispered.

"Us. Here," Dawes murmured. Her finger drew a curve toward the window. "The snow gathers in an arc at the bottom of the window, and covers those tree limbs just beyond. That fireplace is useable, did you know? This is a very comfortable room on a winter evening."

A breeze blew the heavy curtain at the window. "Hard to imagine snow on a morning like this. If we didn't have to go to work in a couple of hours, we could go play softball."

"Do you play?"

Chris laughed, "No, but ever since I came out, I thought I should."

"That was Deidre's game. She was very good, I am told."

"She looks athletic, still. How long has she had MS?"

"Fifteen years."

"She appears to be in remission. Has she had many flare-ups?"

"The first bad one, when she was diagnosed fifteen years ago, then another sometime before they moved to Madison eleven years ago, and I think two since."

"She was lucky to be diagnosed so quickly. Some MS patients go from bout to bout not knowing what's happening to them."

"Deidre was a nurse. She was almost certain she knew what was happening to her, but she didn't want to believe it."

"She was already with Sue?"

"Mmm. In Chicago."

"They're from Chicago, too? Did you know them there?"

"No," Dawes laughed. "I was still a wild child in the woods of Quebec when they moved here. Some mutual friends told me to look them up when I accepted your job offer with the trauma unit here."

Chris shook her head and stared at the woman holding her. "I keep forgetting you're so young. D, you're only twenty-three."

"And you are a venerable, old thirty!" Dawes laughed, then smiled deeply into Chris' eyes. "I do like it that you called me 'D.' It's Sue and Deidre's name for me, but no one else has ever picked it up before."

"It suits you." Chris looked toward the fireplace and tried to imagine a crackling flame, the soft scent of burning wood. With sunlight beginning to pour into the room through the open window, it was easier to dream of a warm, cozy fire than snow tapping on the glass. Still, she had to give it up, and looked again toward the window. Better to simply enjoy the season at hand. Her thoughts drifted back to Sue and Deidre.

"Sue looks athletic, too. Did she play softball?"

"No, I think she was a swimmer in high school. She didn't play sports in college, because she got her degree at night. She worked her way through by delivering beverages to grocery stores in Chicago. It was heavy work, she told me, but kept her strong."

"That's good. She can probably lift Deidre pretty easily, then."

Dawes drew back and looked directly into her eyes. "What are you thinking, Chris?"

Chris realized she'd been thinking out loud, something her doctor's demeanor seldom allowed her to do. She felt so at ease in Dawes' arms, she'd forgotten herself. She shook her head, as though to dismiss her comments as irrelevant, and lied, "Just that, if Deidre were to fall, or need help getting up, I was just thinking she must feel safer having Sue with her."

"You are thinking it will get worse."

"Not necessarily, D. There's no predicting, and no sense in worrying. MS cases vary incredibly. Besides, more therapies are being developed all the time, and it's possible to maintain remissions for the full life span."

Dawes turned back toward the window, her eyes seeing her own view. Chris stroked her face, turned it and her darkly clear eyes back in Chris' direction.

"Deidre is a strong, otherwise healthy woman. She's surrounded by the love of two women she loves in return. All that means a lot in forming a prognosis."

"She is so beautiful," Dawes whispered, tears filling her eyes.

"Yes, darling. She's beautiful inside and out." Chris reached around Dawes' neck and pulled her in close. She needed to guard against such lapses around Dawes, who probably hadn't researched the disease. It wouldn't be in her nature to do so. And, it wouldn't be in her nature to look too far down the road.

She also had to guard against pessimism in herself. Her only MS case was probably the worst she'd ever heard or read about--an end-stage MS patient from her med school clinic days in Boston. Chris had been present in the hospital room as the woman lay dying, her five grown children in silent, stolid vigil around her.

The youngest, a daughter in her early twenties, leaned forward in her chair and laid her hand lightly over her mother's motionless, paralyzed hand. Chris thought she saw the mother's eyelids flutter--the only muscles the woman could move by that time were those around her eyes--but she wasn't sure she'd actually seen movement, or had just imagined it. Apparently, the oldest thought he'd seen something too. He moved soundlessly around the foot of the bed and knelt by his sister's side, his back to his mother, and looked up into the young woman's face.

"Let her han' go, Baby," he whispered.

She turned her attention stiffly from her mother to the man beside her, but left her hand where it was. "She can't feel me. It don't hurt her," she whispered a plea.

"We don't know what she know," he spoke with his face close to hers, his voice a softness in the narrow space between them. "Don't hol' Momma back."

Her facial muscles contracted but froze, not permitting the softening and tears Chris expected. She retracted her hand, clasping it quickly with the other, palms cupped as though to cage some delicately winged creature within them, and anchored them tightly between her knees. Her brother rose and sat on the arm of her chair, and reached protectively around her taut shoulders.

"Fly up, Momma," she begged hoarsely. "Fly up out of it!"

Chris realized at that moment that what she had taken for numb, stoic resignation in the patient's children was actually shocked horror. Nothing in their previous experience could have prepared them for each downturn, each victory of disease over tissue, over will, over life itself.

Chris also realized she would possess a psychic's edge compared to patients and their families. She would have the experience to guess the future better than they, but she must be very careful with the burden of that knowledge. What good would it have done for the woman's children, mature as they might be, to know the potential progressions of their mother's slow deterioration? Would imagining such nightmares beforehand make living through the reality easier?

But where do psychics go for solace, Chris wondered. She roused herself, looked into Dawes' questioning eyes and recognized refuge.

"Finished with your coffee?" Chris asked. "I think we need to shower before we leave for work."  
* * *

Chris looked up from her desk. "Come in," she called to the door.

Bailey stuck her head in to announce, "Dr. Langford called. An MS patient of hers is coming in by ambulance. She said you would want to know. Patient's name is," Bailey frowned, looked down at the slip of paper in her hand as Chris, a knot in her stomach, anticipated the next two words. "Deidre Anderson."

"Dr. Langford is coming in also?"

"Yes. Should be here in half an hour."

"Did Dr. Langford give the patient's condition?"

"Paralysis and severe vertigo, possible complications."

Bailey disappeared behind the door, and Chris reached for the telephone.

"Airfield," the male voice responded after one ring.

"This is Dr. McCaleb. I need to contact a helicopter pilot. Her name is Dawes and she's flying a charter to Michigan today."

"Emergency?"

"Urgent message." Chris didn't want it to sound too dire. "Would it be possible to reach her?"

Chris left the message hoping Dawes would get it before she lifted off. It would be hard on her to hear it in the air, not being able to turn back. Chris knew there was little Dawes or anyone could do, but Dawes would want to be with them regardless. 

It was worse than Chris had prepared herself for. Paralysis affected Deidre's torso as well as her legs. Her respiration was labored, and Chris could hear fluid building up in her lungs. Deidre's vision was another complication. With her eyes closed, she felt herself spinning wildly; open, she saw double. The ER staff went to work to stabilize vital signs, especially to keep her kidneys working. Chris left her as soon as Dr. Langford arrived, and went to check on Sue.

"If she's dying, I want to be in there with her," Sue said, as soon as Chris walked into the waiting room.

"She's not dying, Sue. She's had a devastating attack, but she's not going to die. Let's wait out here until Dr. Langford is done. There's not much room in there."

Sue sighed, looked down at the floor, and tears began to come. Chris wrapped her arms around her, and prepared her mind for the things Sue would ask later.

Dawes arrived, having sent another pilot on her charter and arranged an airlift for herself to the hospital's helipad. Chris left her with Sue, rejoined Langford and Deidre, and was heartened to see Deidre resting more comfortably. Her speech was still too slurred to make much sense of it, but Chris and Langford decided it would help Sue to see her now. Chris instructed Bailey to contact Admitting and prepare to move the patient to a room.

Dawes accompanied Sue when they moved Deidre to the inpatient area of the hospital. Chris stayed behind to handle another emergency coming in by helicopter. She was thankful this one, a traffic accident victim, was no one she knew. They worked on him for two hours before he died, and managed to shock him back on two separate resuscitations. The third time his heart stopped, nothing worked.

"Third try's not always a charm," Bailey muttered, as she began to disconnect him from the several pieces of equipment now idling around his body.

Chris washed the dead man's blood from her arms, and went back to change into clean scrubs. Bailey would try to clean him up as best she could, in case the family wanted to see him, but Chris decided she would try to discourage them from doing that.

She sat with them in the same room where she'd earlier held Sue, then left when the chaplain arrived. She went to the desk, found the deceased's chart, and began writing her notes.

"Almost done with that, Doctor?" Bailey asked at her shoulder, clicking her pen in mock anticipation.

"I need a thesaurus, Bailey. What's another word for 'antsy nurse'?"

Bailey grinned widely and whispered, "Horny old broad."

"That's it! It was just on the tip of my tongue, but I couldn't grab it," Chris grinned back, poked an emphatic period at the end of her scribbling, and offered the chart.

"Lunch, Doctor," Bailey touched her watch face before taking the stainless steel folder. "You have exactly one half hour."

"I'll be in Room 528."

"I already made a note of it. Tell that rascal Dawes to stop by before she leaves. Haven't seen her forever."

"I'll tell her to stop by before you leave. I expect she'll stay here through your shift."

"Whatever. She still owes me from our last poker game. But don't remind her; she might not come down."

Chris stopped in the middle of a nod. "I thought you lost the last poker game with Dawes."

"I did," Bailey tossed over her shoulder as she walked toward the treatment room door. "It was strip poker." She turned back toward Chris with a wink, used her rear to push open the door, and disappeared behind it.

* * *

"Bailey wants you to stop downstairs and see her," Chris murmured in Dawes' ear after a quick kiss on her neck. "She wants to collect from your last poker game."

Dawes' reaction, a wide, mischievous grin, gave Bailey's story a hint of credence.

Chris turned to Sue and Deidre, "Apparently the stakes were unorthodox, to put it mildly."

Deidre took a deep breath, and struggled with, "Don't I get a kiss, too?"

Sue and Chris exchanged looks--Chris' one of surprise, Sue's of relief.

Chris checked her watch as she walked quickly around the foot of the bed to approach Deidre where there was more room. "You certainly do," she smiled down into Deidre's eyes, knowing the view from the other side of them was a maddening chaos of duplicated images. "I can't believe your speech has improved so much in such a short time."

"I told her," Sue smiled, "if she keeps recuperating at this rate, she'll be back to normal at the end of the week."

Deidre turned a compassionate face toward her lover. The mixed look of sadness and love they exchanged informed Chris that they were both too aware of the slow rate of recuperation they could expect.

"I will be back in a bit," Dawes said, reached for Sue's shoulder as she rose, and leaned across her to kiss Deidre lightly on her forehead. "Maybe I can buy Bailey lunch to get her mind off poker."

When Dawes was gone, Deidre looked to Sue with a slight nod. Sue glanced quickly, almost nervously toward Chris, then sadly, silently, implored Deidre to let it go. Chris waited for Sue to bring up whatever subject Deidre was asking her to present. 

Deidre managed to utter, "Sue, please. It's time."

They stared at each other, Deidre calmly, Sue with consternation cinching her brow. Finally Sue turned to Chris.

"We need your help," she said simply. Chris tensed slightly. "Deidre doesn't want this to go on much longer."

"Deidre," Chris said quietly, moving closer to her despite an urge get far away, "you know I can't do what you're asking. You're a nurse. You know the commitment."

Sue answered for her, and Chris gathered they'd talked it over before today.

"Chris, we both know enough about medicine to know we have to make our own rules. It's gone beyond the rational. If it hadn't been for what we did this morning, Deidre would be dying right now."

"Exactly. What we did," Chris countered. "You called Dr. Langford. You brought Deidre to me."

"If I hadn't, her death would have been days long," Sue whispered, looking at Deidre. Had they actually considered not getting help before calling Langford? Chris wondered.

"Deidre, you'll get better," Chris tried to reason, but Deidre's compassionate, weak smile reminded Chris she was conversing with a colleague. Chris leaned in close again, careful not to contact Deidre's body. Where she was paralyzed, she couldn't absorb the comfort of Chris' touch; where she could feel, there probably was pain.

"I know," Chris continued, "but better than you are now. It will take a long time, but you have Sue, and D. And you have me, Deidre. I can't do what you're asking, but I can help in other ways."

"She's determined not to live like this," Sue stubbornly, placidly insisted. "We have to do something."

Chris looked directly into Sue's eyes. She was capable, Chris decided, of doing whatever Deidre instructed her to do.

She inhaled deeply, and turned back to Deidre. "You are not imminently terminal. Even if you were, I could do no more than withhold extraordinary measures. You may refuse treatment for your condition, or instruct me to do only what is minimally required to keep you alive if you accept my care. But I can do nothing to hasten your death. Deidre, you know all this."

"I thought," Deidre fought to enunciate, "you have a different sense of it."

"No, dear. I don't"

Sue looked away from them both, and Chris was unable to read relief or sadness in her posture. Deidre's reaction, however, cut at Chris' heart.

"Oh, god," Deidre mumbled, her eyes shutting momentarily, then flying open as vertigo sent her head reeling.

"Look at her," Sue growled. "How can you ask me to leave her like this? She shuts her eyes and the room spins, she opens them and everything's out of focus. She can't move, she's in constant pain, she can only lie there until it's time to move her and give her more pain!"

"Susan," Deidre's whisper turned them both back to her. "Don't." She looked over toward Chris and nodded once, trying to smile. "Love us anyway?"

Air escaped from Chris as though she'd been lightly punched in the stomach. She hoped it sounded more like a laugh than a sob. She bent quickly over Deidre, kissed her softly and whispered, "Yes." 

Still close to Deidre, looking over to Sue, she repeated, "Yes, I love you both." Tears tracked Sue's face. "And I'll do whatever I can otherwise."

"I know," Deidre said gently, close to her ear.

Returning to ER on the elevator, Chris mentally turned away from an image of Deidre's future. Such things were not in her hands, she reminded herself. As the doors slid open, she looked down at her hands which had been covered with a dead man's blood only an hour before. What kind of future would he have had, she wondered, if they'd been successful? She stepped out of the elevator, but turned to walk to the end of the hall, and stood gazing out a window.

Maybe I should have taken my mother's advice, she thought. If her parents had lived, perhaps they would have succeeded in steering her toward their specialty, obstetrics. But their lives had ended abruptly, hurtling together toward earth in an airplane that never completed its journey to Geneva. Chris was still a Harvard medical student, working in Alicia's clinic near Boston City Hospital then.

That's what had turned her toward this kind of medicine, Chris knew, her admiration--her love--for Alicia Bell. Dr. Bell had been at it for twenty years, treating Boston's poor who came to her as often through the alley as they did through the front door. The night Chris got word of the crash, Alicia had held her, let her cry. The day she returned from the memorial service, Alicia had put her back to work, and pushed her out to resume her classes.

"Don't get caught up in this," Alicia had warned. "You'll look around one day and realize your life went by while you were trying to bail an ocean of grief with a thimble. It doesn't end, Chris. Never will, this way."

"Why don't you leave?" Chris asked.

Alicia swept her hand in an arc, indicating the waiting room which was finally empty at that late hour, and mumbled, "Who would take care of them?"

Chris realized she was seeing patients still, always more, even in the dark emptiness. It took its toll. As if to punctuate her warning, Alicia died of a heart attack in the middle of a busy clinic day. Chris was at class, and the nurse was driving a patient home, as Alicia had directed her to do. No one in the full waiting room knew CPR, and Alicia was gone by the time the ambulance got her to Boston City, five blocks away.

Chris tried to find even one physician to continue the clinic, part time if necessary, but was unsuccessful. A midwife in the neighborhood agreed to take over the space and try to continue some of the pre-natal work, within her limitations under the law. For the rest, the people who once crowded Alicia Bell's waiting room would now add to the mob scene in Boston City's ER. Those who would have come in through the alley would in the future either face the authorities' questions or find someone less qualified to staunch their bleeding.

Chris left it behind her, determined to heed Alicia's warning, and accepted the internship in Madison over other offers. Wisconsin seemed farther away from Boston than either New York or L.A. Still, Chris knew, their mentioning that they wanted to start up a trauma unit had piqued her interest. She hadn't been able to completely give up her need for one aspect of the work with Alicia. It had been exciting, even dangerous, now and then.

"Chris?" Bailey's voice was hushed as she stood at Chris' side. As Chris turned and slowly felt herself drawn back to the present, Bailey smiled. "Doctor, you were 'way off. How's your friend?"

* * *

It was late when Chris finally felt ready to wrap it up in her office. As she emerged into the hallway, Jacinta caught her eye from the ER desk. She walked stiffly over, trying to stretch out the kinks on the way.

"You look beat," the young nurse grimaced at her and shook her head.

"I am. I'm going to run upstairs and visit a friend, then leave for the night."

"Your friend is sleeping," Jacinta said, and waved a hand toward the exit. "And Dawes is waiting for you outside on the helipad. Just taking in the sunset, I believe."

Chris found Dawes leaning against the rail, staring up at a sky heaped with multi-colored, illuminated clouds.

"Quite a show," Chris murmured, hooking an arm through Dawes'.

"Mmm," Dawes answered with a look that threatened to draw their faces very close together.

"Did you know what Sue and Deidre wanted to talk to me about?" Chris asked softly.

"Yes."

"I would have liked some prior notice."

"I did consider preparing you, but could not find the words, Chris. And, you turned them down. I might have blamed myself for the failure."

"Failure? D, you think I should have agreed?"

"Is what they asked so shocking?"

"It's understandable, in their situation, but inconceivable in mine. Surely, you can see that." Chris watched Dawes' face as she turned toward her, the long light from the lowering sun playing across her eyes. Still, the love was there, and the tender caring. "D, I can't help people die."

"You do it all the time," Dawes observed. "You help them accept that they are dying, you help them not to feel so much pain, you help them not to be afraid. And you help them when you calm the people who love them, so they can die in peace."

"Other doctors do that. My work, day after day, is to help them fight to live. There's a reason why I do this kind of work."

"Mmm," Dawes nodded, leaned sideways so their shoulders and sides were touching. "So you don't have to think about the rest of it."

Chris stepped to the side to break the connection, to make her point. "Because I believe in fighting for life. I believe in holding on."

"If you believe in life, you must believe also in death. If you believe in living life well, you must also believe in dying well. It is all the same artistry."

Chris shook her head. "I can't talk abstractly about life and death. I'm sorry, I'm not made that way. You're either alive or you're dead. Being dead is worthless, so being alive is everything."

"Define being alive," Dawes said softly.

"Deidre is alive."

"Deidre," Dawes corrected her, staring into the now waning colors of the sky, "is dying too slowly."

"I think we'd better end this conversation now. Are you ready to go home?" Chris asked, patting Dawes' arm.

"Yes. Sue will stay here tonight. I will send her home tomorrow when I come back in."

"Darling, I'm sorry."

Dawes took her hand and led her to the solid wall, out of view of the hospital's windows, and kissed her slowly, lovingly. "Let's go home, Chris."


	6. Bust Out

"Oh, shit!" Heppert whispered to her street shoes and began to untie the laces she had just knotted.

"What'd you forget?" Raylee stood in the doorway between lockerroom and washroom, stuffing her mascara tube into her makeup bag. Everyone else had left because Heppert and Raylee always planted an extra lot of cells on Tuesday, and because Heppert had managed to slow them down another half hour this particular day.

"A sterility test. In a thio tube. I put it back under the cabinet with the unused thio and forgot to put it with the tests in the incubator." 

"Oh, hell, Heppert," Raylee waved a hand at her as she packed her makeup bag into her purse, "don't change back into your uniform for that. Just put your lab shoes on and grab a lab coat on the way in."

Heppert stopped and acted as though she were considering it, then shook her head. "No, Raylee, if that lot came up contaminated and I'd been in the incubator with street clothes, I'd feel like I'd done it. Especially after today. I don't know why I've been so scatterbrained."

Raylee stood at the door uncomfortably. "Well, I'll wait for you." It was tradition. Members of lab teams waited for each other to leave together. Like women all going to the bathroom together, Heppert thought.

"No, you go ahead. This will only take a minute. Corey will be waiting for you at the sitter's as it is."

That was all Raylee needed. Motherhood always wins out, thank god, Heppert thought. She had plenty of time to wait for the plant to empty out completely, so she proceeded with her charade. Once back in her uniform of white pants, top, and lab shoes, she walked briskly back through the hallway along velcro-like mats which scrubbed the treaded soles of her lab shoes. Two clear-glass doors swooshed open on her approach. She grabbed a disposable bonnet from an open box on a cart by the doors, stretched the bonnet's elastic opening with ten fingers spread wide, and covered her hair with a brief, unthinking movement as she walked through.

At the window of each door lining either side of the darkened hallway, eerie green auras glowed. Heppert found herself holding her breath and walking precisely down the center of the hall, as though the ultraviolet rays used to sterilize the rooms on the other side of those doors were getting through the windows and trying to reach her. The hum of motors, slowly rotating racks of bottles in the walk-in incubators between the lab rooms, added to her sense that this place was alive in the darkness. She wished she had turned on the hall lights before entering.

She stopped at one of the doors, flipped to off a switch controlling the ultraviolet lights within, and flipped on another for the fluorescent lights. As the room gleamed to brightness, she entered, retrieved the rack of test tubes she had earlier placed behind the door of a cabinet under the counter, and selected the tube she'd planted for her excuse to stay. She looked at the chrome-capped cylinder, cell lot number and date neatly printed in wax pencil with her own block letters. 

"This is it," she sighed. She replaced the rack in the cabinet, closed the cabinet door, and stood with the tube in her hand. She looked around the room, at walls she scrubbed herself routinely, countertops she wiped down with alcohol every morning and evening. 

This place had been a veritable playground, Heppert thought. For ten years, she had worked with teams of women who, like her, had begun here with only high school educations, but who could now talk in the terminology of science, peer at living cells through expensive microscopes, handle laboratory equipment and dress in sterile garb as though they really were scientists.

She turned and walked to the door of the incubator shared by this and the next door lab. Out of habit, she checked the gauges for proper temperature and humidity, flipped on the lights, and entered the rush of warm air and louder hum of motors. These were "healthy cells" Heppert reminded herself. They were growing, reproducing, feeding on the nutrient-rich fluids washing over them as their containers, their worlds, slowly revolved. If all went well in coming days, they would be introduced at the peak of their existence to a virus which would be capable of altering each cell's metabolism. They would no longer be healthy cells, but the losing side of an old struggle.

No wonder we think in terms of something must die so something else can live, Heppert thought as she placed the test tube in the rack of tubes from that day's work. That equation is what's going on inside each of us every minute. It's at the core of our being, so how can it be wrong? 

"It's wrong when it doesn't have to be that way," she whispered, and walked out of the incubator. Resetting light switches as she went, Heppert retraced her route, discarding the bonnet as the glass doors slid shut behind her. She passed the kitchen and breathed deeply, wondering if she would ever again smell the odor of cooked brown paper as she glanced at a cartful of now-sterile, wrapped equipment cooling next to one of the autoclaves. Beyond the kitchen, darkened windows of the supervisors' offices and the absolute quiet informed her she was indeed alone in this section. She hurried back to the locker room to change.

Again in her street clothes, Heppert cautiously opened the door to the parking lot. Seeing no one, she unlocked her bicycle from the rack near the stairs, hefted it to her shoulder, and carried it into the building, then through the hallway beyond the kitchen and supervisors' offices to the warehouse area. Hiding behind the familiar stacks of supplies marked off for her department, Heppert ate a sandwich from the sack of food she'd brought, and tried to relax on the smooth, concrete floor.

She began to review her actions of the night before, the frenzied trips in Margaret's van to the bank, the mall, her apartment. She had been able to gather up so little of her life to take with her. Well, Heppert shrugged, I always said I believed in traveling light.

* * *

"Rosemarie?" Margaret's face was close, her voice a tense whisper. "It's twenty past eleven."

Heppert woke with a knot in her stomach, and looked into the eyes of her co-conspirator. 

"You can still back out," Margaret reminded her, placing a hand on Heppert's shoulder.

She stared at the floor a moment, realizing she was actually considering it. She was going to miss this place. She would never see Deidre and Sue or Dawes again. She would never see her apartment again. She would never, unless the law dragged her back, see Madison again. Heppert looked up at Margaret. But if she didn't, she would never see Margaret again, except to visit her in jail because, on her own, this woman was going to get caught.

"Let's do it, Louie," she Bogarted, and rose to pat the saddle of her bike in farewell as she removed her panniers.

"We have a problem," Margaret whispered. "There are two guards tonight."

Heppert froze. "Shit," she sighed, and slid down the side of the nearest stack of cartons.

"I was thinking," Margaret proposed, "maybe you and I could go to opposite sides of the building, open a door each, then run back to the research fire door and load the dogs."

Heppert shook her head. "Never work. We'd run right in to one or both of them while we were trying to get back to research. Or one of them would stay at the desk and communicate with the other by walkie-talkie. Why the hell are there two tonight?"

"One's a rookie," Margaret shrugged. "I was afraid they'd beefed up security because of me, but I was being paranoid."

"No, Margaret, paranoia is an unreasonable fear," Heppert smirked. "So one's a rookie, huh? I wonder which one will be doing rounds."

"The rookie did rounds by himself at eleven."

"That could work to our advantage," Heppert said, jumped up, and pulled Margaret with her, returning to the tissue culture lab hallway.

Heppert led her into the lab at the end of the hallway, next to a door which opened out to another side of the warehouse they'd just left.

"Why didn't we just come in this way?" Margaret asked, looking through the window of the door into the warehouse.

"It's locked from that way," Heppert explained. "If we draw them to this spot, they'll have to take the time to unlock the door to get in here.

"Rosemarie, we can't start a fire, it would endanger their lives."

"Exactly. We need something like a big bang, but a harmless one. The popgun of lab explosions!" Heppert laughed.

Heppert entered the lab, yanked open two cabinet drawers with both hands, grabbed a flat cellophane envelope from one and a roll of masking tape from the other. Turning to face Margaret's deepening frown, Heppert laughed again and extracted a sterile glove from the envelope.

"You would never have done anything this unprofessional," Heppert grinned, "not even for kicks." She slipped the wrist end of the glove over the end of the lab's air hose which extended from a chrome spigot set into the countertop. Next, Heppert tightly wrapped the glove to the hose with the tape.

"The time we did this, the glove blew up the size of a hog before it burst. The supes were all in a meeting out of the area. Made such a loud bang, we were afraid somebody in the warehouse would hear it and we'd all get fired!"

"But no one did? Rosemarie, how will the guards hear it?"

"One, we have two gloves," Heppert held up the other, led Margaret out of that lab, across the hall to another, and created the same contraption there.

"Two," Heppert continued once they were back in the hallway, "it took about ten minutes with the air valve completely open to achieve lift-off." Heppert frowned, "But those gloves had been used and autoclaved once; these are new, and possibly stronger. Helen ordered them to see if they'd hold up to autoclaving better. So, we start the process fifteen minutes before they're due to be somewhere near here on rounds."

"The noise will divert their attention when we open the research door," Margaret nodded.

"With any luck, it will draw the second guard in this direction, away from the desk, so that when we open the door neither one will be there to read which door is being opened. They'll be here trying to figure out what blew up and if they need to pull a fire alarm, and the open door will be just another problem to deal with, possibly not as important on their list of priorities."

"Especially since different ones have been going off periodically by themselves lately," Margaret mused.

"They have?"

Margaret smiled, "Yes, I've suggested the system be checked since I've observed it malfunctioning several times this month while working late. The door alarm goes off, the guard checks it, but it's shut and nobody's around, and nothing's been stolen."

"You devil, you," Heppert let her eyes communicate respectful appreciation.

"Oh, didn't I mention it? The guard seemed pretty irritated with the situation the last time it happened."

They crept across the dim aisles of the warehouse to the research area door directly in line with the one opening out from the tissue culture section. They entered the isolation area and found twenty sleeping beagles in their cages, and began carrying their sedated little bodies toward the fire door through which they would eventually exit directly to the parking lot. Margaret's van, all but the front two seats removed, waited just beyond the door.

"This one's snoring," Heppert smiled down into the face of the one she was lifting on their fifth trip back.

"That's Sillie," Margaret said, pulling her next escapee from his cage.

"No, really, Margaret," Heppert stopped and turned toward her, "Listen."

"I mean her name," Margaret explained. "We named her after Beverly Sills because she's quite the singer. Have you ever heard a beagle howl?"

Heppert shook her head.

"Well, you will, probably at dawn tomorrow morning if we make our destination. They'll sing us right through the roof!"

When the dogs were all arranged together next to the door, Margaret checked her watch again.

"Oh, lord, we have less than a minute to turn on the air!"

"Damn!" Heppert ran for the warehouse and, once in the wide aisles there, broke into a sprint hoping no one would be in the area to hear her footfalls. She reached the labs in what she hoped was enough time, opened the air valves, and rechecked the tape to ensure there would be no leakage. Then she slipped back out through the door to the warehouse, and cut straight across to the research door to rejoin Margaret. They sat quietly on the floor by the door, stroking the snoozing beagles, hoping to keep themselves calm in the process.

"Fourteen minutes and counting," Heppert muttered, and headed for the hallway which connected research to the warehouse. Margaret followed, and both dove for a place to hide when they heard the guard approach, walkie talkie squawking.

"Get ready to go for the door," Heppert whispered in Margaret's ear, and Margaret nodded emphatically. They waited as the guard keyed in his code to the electronic station, and moved on toward the tissue culture side of the warehouse. Heppert grimaced at their bad luck; it was the experienced guard. She looked at her watch. Time always passes slowly when you're waiting, she reminded herself. But her watch confirmed the real passage of minutes, beyond fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. Heppert cracked the door, and tiptoed to a vantage point where she could watch the guard disappear into another section of the building. Nothing had happened.

"Oh," she felt sick air escaping through her gullet from her churning stomach. She sank to the floor and looked back at Margaret peeking at her from around the research door.

"Stay," Heppert motioned. "I'll go check."

When she arrived at the lab doors, Heppert stared and shook her head back and forth. The gloves had inflated, both filling the floor space of their individual rooms, and were continuing to grow--great, flesh-colored mammoths with appendages the size of Heppert's legs, five each. Heppert, praying they wouldn't explode while she was in the room, ran first to one valve then the other, and shut off the air. Her wake caused the gloves to bounce gaily, then settle into a gentle rocking at the ends of their respective umbilical cords.

Margaret had said the guards do rounds every hour. One would return in just less than an hour, but how to know when to restart the air? They could go at any time, Heppert thought. Five or ten minutes, she estimated blindly, but couldn't decide which. 

"Heads, five; tails, ten," she said, and flipped a quarter into the air. "Tails. Ten it is."

At least, with any luck, the rookie would take the next round. Heppert reset the lights and, this time, taped the door lock open before running back across the warehouse to apprise Margaret that they were now an hour off schedule.

Ten minutes before the guard was due in the area, Heppert returned to the other side. She opened the valves, pulled the tape off the door lock, and raced back to the research area. Five, then seven minutes elapsed. Heppert peered through the window of the door, and thought she was imagining something new in the view through the window into the eerie green light of the tissue culture hallway.

"I wish I had a pair of binoculars," she whispered. Margaret hurried into her office and came back with a pair. "I wish I were in your apartment having pizza and beer and telling you about this crazy dream I had last night," Heppert looked around, then shrugged. "I only get one, huh?"

She looked back through the glass, pulled the binoculars away from her eyes, and stared at Margaret. Margaret took the binoculars and looked for herself. They both sank down to the floor and waited. The gloves, now growing out through the doors to meet each other in the hallway, were bound to find a sharp point somewhere to prick their drum-tight skins.

The walkie talkie squawked on the other side of the door as the guard arrived, and the other side of the building blew up.

"Jesus H. Christ!" The guard bellowed, and Margaret and Heppert made for the dogs.

* * *

Margaret laughed out loud for the first time in twenty-four hours. Heppert savored the sound, and the look on her friend's face as Margaret very briefly let go of the steering wheel. Quietly, to not disturb the still sleeping beagles, she applauded Heppert's disguise.

"Rosemarie, the mustache is perfect! But how are you going to get it off?"

"It's Elmer's," Heppert explained, switching off the overhead map light. "It'll come off with soap and water."

"That easily? Don't sneeze!"

"I'm pretty sure it'll hold up through a sneeze. Besides, I was afraid that if I used something that wasn't water soluble, the fumes would get to me."

The job had taken some careful cutting of her dyed hair and a now itchy, thick application of the glue, applied by fluorescent lantern under a blanket in the back of the rocking van. Heppert had thought the dye job was difficult enough, hunched over Margaret's plastic dishpan. By the time she started concentrating on the mustache, she could barely see straight. She arched her kinked back, then pulled at the seat belt and settled into the passenger seat.

"I do like you better in your own red hair, though."

"Then you'll just have to wait until this grows out," Heppert scratched at her now black, short hair. "I had to use a permanent dye, because I'm going to sweat like a pig with all this padding on."

"You really do look like a man," Margaret glanced from the road to her passenger and back to the road again.

Heppert wanted to ask if Margaret liked the rest of her better the old way as well, but couldn't think how to phrase it.

"Good. Your wig looks believable, too," she responded instead.

The disguises had been Heppert's contribution to the plan, as was the CB radio she had bought and installed in Margaret's van Monday night, so they could monitor the police channels. They were then able to take Highway 151 northeast out of Madison en route to Green Bay, listening for any mention that the police were looking for them. They had been driving for almost an hour and a half, and had only heard the report of an explosion at PetLove, and a possible break-in.

The police, once they pieced it all together, would be looking for two women, Heppert figured--one a tall red head and one a shorter dark-hair with distinguished gray highlights, driving a wine-colored Dodge Caravan loaded with twenty dogs, Wisconsin license plate number XKE112. As Heppert knew from months of staring at wine-colored Dodge Caravans on the streets in and around Madison to see if the driver was indeed Margaret, they had an advantage in the number of like vehicles on the road. Sue and Deidre's license plates, which Heppert "borrowed" when she went home late Monday night to pack, should also give them a chance for awhile, she reassured herself, as long as they read her note and weren't so angry with her that they called the police.

Thus, what the police would see on Highway 151 and points north was a short, portly, dark haired, mustached man and a woman with medium-length blond hair, driving a van of the right color, but wrong license number. Heppert hoped the police would keep having such experiences with theirs as well as other vehicles--right color van, wrong combination of people, wrong license plate--all night long and in the coming days.

With any luck, they'd never see the dogs at all, carefully tucked behind and under a solid tent of stacked luggage, blankets, and clothing. Alex should stay hidden as well, Heppert and Margaret had agreed, and was contentedly grooming himself at the moment in his molded-plastic pet kennel behind the driver's seat.

"When I first saw how much you were bringing, I almost yelled at you," Heppert grinned over at Margaret.

"I know. I saw your neck turn the color of your hair--your real hair. But, Rosemarie, I had much longer to think about leaving than you did. As the days and weeks went by, I kept seeing things around my apartment I felt I couldn't leave behind."

What about me, Heppert wanted to ask. Did you ever look at me in that time and feel that way? But Margaret kept her eyes on the road, and didn't speak for several minutes.

"Like you," she murmured, so low that Heppert wasn't sure she'd heard.

"What?"

"Like you," Margaret uttered, only a little louder than before. "You were one of the things I started to feel I couldn't leave behind."

"Then why did I have to drag it out of you that you were planning this?"

"Oh, Rosemarie," Margaret smiled widely and shook her head. "Believe me, you never would have heard about it at all, if I hadn't felt that way."

Heppert held her breath, then asked just harder than a whisper, "What way?"

"I can't talk about this and drive, Rosemarie!"

"Pull over."

"Forget it, we're not even to Green Bay, yet. Let's keep our minds on the problem at hand, shall we?"

But Heppert felt like she'd just been let out of the starting blocks. She popped out of her seat belt, moved to Margaret, and nuzzled her neck.

"Rosemarie. Don't." Margaret's tone, flat and immediate, froze Heppert in mid-nuzzle.

Oh, god, Heppert thought. I am such a fool.

"Not while you've got that damned mustache," Margaret shook her head slowly.

Heppert pulled back and tried to peer through the darkness to read Margaret's face.

"I'm sorry, you just don't look like you! It's too weird, Rosemarie."

"But when I look like me again," Heppert ventured, "it will be all right?"

Margaret smiled slowly, glancing back and forth between Heppert and the road ahead, "When you look like you again, that had better be just the beginning."

"Do I have to wait for my hair to grow out too?"

"I just have a hangup about you're looking male, dear. Not non-Celtic. I have no intention of waiting any longer than we have to."

Heppert squatted with her back against the passenger seat and frowned. To finally know, but to have to wait--it was like one of those damned Doris Day teasers she used to watch on TV when she was a kid. Margaret looked down at her and laughed, mussed her hair, then left her hand there.

"I know, Rosemarie. I feel the same way. But you'd better sit in the seat and buckle up, dear."

Heppert squeezed her hand, thought about kissing it but realized Margaret would feel the mustache that way, too. She replaced the hand on the steering wheel with another squeeze, and resumed her seat.

They were just beyond Green Bay on 141 when the CB crackled with an all points bulletin for Margaret's van and a description of Margaret and the dogs. They still hadn't discovered Alex and Heppert were missing, too.

"We could probably stay on this road," Heppert offered. "Unless, of course, they put up roadblocks or something like that."

"Would they do that?"

"I have no idea," Heppert whispered. For the second time that night, a curl of fear spiralled around her gut.

"I think we'd better start taking back roads," Margaret decided, and took the next exit.

They began to follow dirt and gravel roads, connecting to paved roads only now and then. Heppert, using a flashlight rather than the map light in the ceiling above her, peered from moonlit road signs to the chart in her lap, trying to keep them safe but on course. Finally, she had to admit they were lost.

"Let me see the map," Margaret said, and looked at where Heppert pointed, the general vicinity she guessed to be their location at the moment. Margaret sat back, thought a minute, then looked around them through the windows on all sides.

"We've been heading west, though, Rosemarie. Look back through the rear window. The sun is going to rise back there."

"How do you know that?" Heppert looked at the sky above a short stretch of road behind them which seemed just as dim as the road ahead. The view closed off abruptly in the dense silhouette of trees.

"The moon came from that direction, and is going to set in front of us."

Heppert stared at her. She had no idea whether Margaret was correct, but could see that she was absolutely sure of herself.

"You city kids are all alike," Margaret laughed. "You get lost in a wide open pasture, but can find your way around an underground maze of subway trains. Let's switch. You drive, I'll read the map."

"There are signs in subways," Heppert complained, getting out of her seat.

"There are signs out here, too," Margaret said. "They're just of a different sort."

They continued on, Heppert steering to Margaret's directions. She realized Margaret knew what she was talking about when they reached the junction of county road T that Margaret had predicted was somewhere just ahead.

"We're almost there," Margaret said. "We should be seeing a sign for the lake any time now."

"My kind of sign?" Heppert yawned.

"Your kind of sign, dear," Margaret nodded.

Three miles down a dirt road after they turned off for Coleman Lake, Margaret directed Heppert to take a series of turns which led them deeper into dense woods.

"You've been here before?"

"Oh, yes. I know exactly where I am now. Tony and Becca have lived here for about eight years, and I've visited every summer. Of course, I always came in from the other side before, using the highway. You're going to be at their entrance soon, Rosemarie."

The sky had been growing lighter in the last quarter hour. As Heppert pulled up to the cabin at the end of the drive, she could discern the figures of two women, about Margaret's age, coming out onto the porch and waving. When Margaret climbed quickly out of the van, however, both women looked at each other and then quickly from Margaret to Heppert.

"Baba, it's me!" Margaret called, stopping at the front of the van while a large husky walked slowly toward the vehicle, sniffing the air. The husky's tail began to sway, then wag in full greeting, punctuated by a loud bark. It stopped, though, as Heppert opened the driver's side and climbed down. The two women who had been advancing toward Margaret continued with their greetings, but glanced nervously at Heppert.

"This is Rosemarie," Margaret grinned. Heppert could see that Margaret was thoroughly enjoying their consternation. Margaret pulled off her wig and explained, "Unfortunately, Rosemarie's disguise is more radical. Is it true soap and water takes off Elmer's glue?"

***

They were another hour getting settled, first hiding the van in a wide, shallow cave several yards from the cabin. Tony and Becca had cleared it of the miscellaneous equipment and tools they stored there, and reinforced the old wooden door on its ancient hinges, replacing the lock as well. They'd gotten busy on the project right after Margaret's call, some two weeks before.

"Margaret, you called here long distance?" Heppert asked, frowning.

"From a pay phone, dear," Margaret reassured her as they helped Becca swing the gate-like door shut.

The dogs were kenneled in a new enclosure, added to the back of an old stable where two elderly mares stood dozing in the early morning light. The dogs were groggy, but waking. Margaret poured fresh water into buckets she had brought, and Heppert set out large bowls of dried dog food from the van.

"Beagles, huh?" Tony said. "Well, they can bay at the moon all they want out here, nobody'll hear them!"

"The run is perfect, Tony," Margaret observed. "They'll be very comfortable here."

"Welcome to the latest station along the new-age underground railroad," Becca murmured through the wire mesh between her and Sillie, who yawned a little squeak and laid back down.

"That," Heppert stretched and muttered, "looks like a wonderful idea."

While Margaret took a shower, Alex curled up against the door to the bathroom and kept a wary eye on the front door to the porch where Baba lounged. Tony cooked up some breakfast for all of them, and Becca worked with Heppert on her lip restoration. Heppert held her nostrils shut while Becca scrubbed.

"Well, that's an improvement!" Tony nodded to both of them when they were done. "Feel better?"

"A little raw." Heppert confessed, "It was unnecessary, really. Margaret told me we'd arrive before daybreak, but I was afraid we might be stopped on the way here. I hoped it would be convincing to a cop with a flashlight."

"If you want one again, though," Becca laughed, "I'm sure we can figure out an easier way to attach it to you."

"Velcro or something," Tony suggested, and started arranging breakfast on the table.

"Your turn, Rosemarie," Margaret announced, entering the great room with Alex at her heels. She stopped before Heppert and stared. Margaret smelled of soap, and was dressed only in a t-shirt and soft, gray sweat shorts.

"Oh, that's much better," Margaret murmured.

Heppert's heart thunked. "Look more like myself?"

"Much, much better," she murmured again, and played her fingers through the dark hair at Heppert's forehead.

"Well, Peggy," Becca said, exchanging glances with Tony, "I guess we should have put your stuff up in the loft. Tony and I will take the beds in the spare room."

"Why the hell didn't you tell us?" Tony demanded.

"We, well," Margaret hesitated, then looked to Heppert for help, but all Heppert could do was grin and shrug. "We only just got this far on the drive here."

"A honeymoon on the lam!" Becca laughed, and went off to ready the loft while the others ate.

When Heppert emerged from her shower, Becca and Tony had departed to their jobs in a nearby town. She found Margaret already in bed up in the loft, her eyes closed. Heppert eased into the bed, hoping to wake her anyway.

"Are you kidding? You thought I'd be sleeping?"

"Well, we have had a couple of sleepless nights," Heppert reasoned.

"Let's have a couple more."

"Oh, god," Heppert murmured, staring down into Margaret's eyes.

"You can call me Margaret." She found the hem of Heppert's t-shirt, slipped her hands under, and began exploring, massaging Heppert's sides, back, and front in her search.

Heppert realized that all her dreams for the last six months were lying just beneath her, growing warmer. She pushed herself up, removed her shirt, then helped Margaret remove hers. Beginning where she'd left off earlier, Heppert nuzzled Margaret's neck, and slowly worked her way to her lips.

"Oh, Rosem..." Margaret was interrupted by another pass from Heppert's lips, this one deeper than the one before. Heppert felt Margaret's hips moving up and down, her pelvis pressing hard against Heppert's thigh. As Heppert drew slowly down to kiss Margaret's breasts, Margaret moaned and grasped Heppert's thigh. Heppert let Margaret know she wanted the shorts off, and Margaret helped, in what may have been just in time for both of them.

"Maybe we'll take longer next time," Heppert whispered into Margaret neck, just behind her ear.

"See you in a couple hours, then," Margaret nuzzled back, and they both slept.

Heppert was aware of movement in the great room below almost before she was aware of being awake. Margaret slept only inches away, snoring softly. A rustle below confirmed Heppert's fear. Whoever was down there was leafing through Tony and Becca's papers on the desk by the door. She forced her terror-frozen joints to bend, trying to ease out of the bed silently, and without waking Margaret.

Heppert peeked over the rail and, seeing no one from the middle of the room to the far wall, rose higher for a vantage point from which she could view the area under the loft. Tony, sitting at the desk, put down the paper she'd been reading and reached for another envelope with one hand, letter opener with the other. Heppert leaned heavily on the rail and exhaled. Becca appeared from the hall to the bathroom and spare room, spotted Heppert, and waved. In a stage whisper, she said, "We didn't want to frighten you, but we didn't want to interrupt your sleep, either. Are you hungry? Could you eat some dinner?"

Heppert realized she was very hungry. "I'm starving," she stage whispered back, just before being grabbed from behind and yanked back into the bed. 

As Margaret pinned her, Heppert overheard Tony suggest, "Well, how 'bout we feed the animals and give those two a little more time?"

* * *

After dinner, Tony and Becca gave them the news they'd heard in town, but had been saving until they felt their guests were as comfortable as possible.

"The FBI's been brought in on the search for you," Becca began. "We think you'd be better off with us than trying to make the border."


	7. The Decision

Dawes returned to the apartment with a small smile on her face, and hummed under her breath after taking a sip of Chris' coffee.

"She must have taken it better than you anticipated," Chris observed.

Dawes snapped her eyebrows up and down and grinned, "She still is not home."

"You don't think we should be concerned?"

"Not if she is with Margaret." Dawes' eyes were practically dancing out of their sockets. Chris couldn't restrain her own laughter, watching the glee in her expression.

"You're truly happy about this, aren't you? Despite your jokes with Sue, you really do care for Heppert."

"Mmm," Dawes tilted her head, begrudgingly, then laughed. "I like to tease Hep, but yes, I do like her quite a lot--and Margaret." She pulled Chris in close, adding demonstrative emphasis as one hand parted Chris' robe, "And they will make wonderful passion together."

"And that, especially, has you excited, doesn't it?" Chris laughed, but felt herself responding as well. Then she sobered.

"D, what if something's happened to her? Is there anyway to be sure she's at Margaret's?"

"I'll call later, after the sun has finished opening its eyes. Most of the city has not risen yet, ma joli," Dawes' lips found the spot behind Chris' ear that she'd recently learned to stimulate.

Chris wriggled loose. "In the meantime, we could do those chores you mentioned needed to be done before we get ready for work."

"Then we could take a shower," Dawes grinned.

* * *

Chris switched on the morning radio news after pouring another cup of coffee. She could hear Dawes opening Sue and Deidre's screen door below to carry trash bags out to containers by the street where she'd already stacked their own. Chris was thinking about Deidre, when the radio commentator's words made a string of meaning that pried into her consciousness.

"D!" Chris leaned out over the railing of the outside stairway, and waved frantically to Dawes below in the driveway. Dawes dropped the sacks she was carrying to sprint toward the stairs.

"...were received by three of the major news organizations in the Madison area, including this station. We've been told that the Associated Press has also placed the story on their wire service. This will undoubtedly not sit well with Corky Bonner, popular actress and last year's spokeswoman for PetLove in televised advertisements. We tried to contact Ms. Bonner this morning, but she was unavailable for comment."

"What?" Dawes panted, looking from the phone to Chris.

"Not Deidre--Margaret! Listen," Chris pointed to the radio.

"Once again, the top news story of the hour, an explosion and break-in--or break-out, if you will--at PetLove Laboratories here in Madison. A PetLove research virologist, Dr. Margaret Fisher, has apparently absconded with twenty dogs that were scheduled to be infected with rabies next week. PetLove assured police that the dogs are healthy and docile, although they declined to describe Dr. Fisher in the same terms."

"That is crazy," Dawes insisted, listened for more, but the program switched to music. "Margaret would not do something like that!"

"She sent letters to that radio station and others, outlining why she was doing it."

"Heppert?"

"They didn't say anything about Heppert."

Dawes ran down the stairs, calling over her shoulder, "Sue and Deidre have a key. I'll be right back."

Dawes returned with a ring of keys, fumbled for the right one, and finally found one that would open Heppert's door.

They discovered two empty drawers in Heppert's dresser, and a wide gap in the arrangement of clothes in her closet, as well. Dawes plopped down on the old couch in Heppert's living room and stared at the floor. Chris eased down next to her, put an arm around her shoulders.

"When I came up to tell her about Deidre last night and she wasn't here, I was sure she was with Margaret." She looked up, and Chris could see the disappointment on her face. "I was happy. I thought, 'I can go to the hospital tomorrow and tell Deidre it has happened, they are finally together.' She is always saying that's the way it should be."

"I don't think we should tell Deidre about this right now," Chris advised.

"We cannot keep it from her, Chris. She cannot watch TV because it makes her dizzy, but she asked me to bring in their jambox when I came back this morning."

"Maybe she just wants to play tapes."

"Maybe," Dawes sighed, then shook her head. "No, suppose she overhears a conversation about it, or somebody actually comes right out and tells her? I have got to tell her, Chris."

They had planned to leave for the hospital in different vehicles, Dawes to drive Sue and Deidre's car so Sue could return to the house while Dawes stayed. When Dawes opened the garage door, she met indisputable proof of Heppert's involvement. The car's license plates were gone, and pressed under one windshield wiper was an envelope containing fifty dollars cash and an apologetic note from Heppert to Sue and Deidre. They drove Chris' car instead, traveling the distance in shocked silence.

Sue and Deidre had already heard the news, more of it than Chris and Dawes, in fact, and filled them in with more of what Margaret had written to the media. Chris was relieved to see that Deidre didn't take the news of Heppert's involvement that badly. She seemed more upset that Heppert had left money she might need later. She had Sue read the note to her twice.

"I hope," she whispered, saving her voice as Chris instructed her, "they make it." Then, sadly to Sue, "But not to see them again," and slowly moved her head from side to side. Sue stroked her hair lightly, kissed her cheek.

"It will be worth it, if they stay safe, Babe."

In the hallway, where Deidre couldn't hear, Sue growled, "If I do ever see Heppert again, I'm likely to kick the shit out of her! What the hell kind of insanity could make her do this?"

Chris looked at Sue and smiled, and Sue relaxed, scowled, and muttered, "I don't care how moonstruck she is, there's no excuse for this."

"You'd better get home now," Chris said. "It won't be long before they realize Heppert's not at work. They could be getting a search warrant this minute."

Sue glanced at her watch, nodded, and hurried to the elevator. Chris walked in the opposite direction, toward the staff elevator which would carry her to the ER. Sue's question echoed in her ears. What indeed could motivate two women--by their closest friends' descriptions, shy, conservative, predictable--to take the law into their own hands, destroy property, and, at best, resign themselves to being fugitives? At worst, Chris reflected, the two were facing imprisonment.

As the elevator doors closed, and the small room hummed into movement, Chris realized they both must have believed in what they were doing. Margaret, from what she wrote, was convinced her new vaccine wasn't worth the agony to which those dogs would be subjected. Heppert either believed that as well, or simply believed in Margaret. Then Deidre's face appeared, her sea-green eyes smiling over the rim of her coffee cup, connected somehow to what Chris had just been thinking.

Chris reached out and held the door open, but didn't step out of the elevator. She concentrated on the leap her mind had just made. Margaret and Heppert who wouldn't allow twenty laboratory animals to die--Deidre who wanted to die. That's the irony, she thought; that's why I juxtaposed the two. But something else nagged at her. Chris knew more connections could be made, but as she stepped out of the elevator toward the bustle of the ER, she knew making them would have to wait.

* * *

Several hours later, Chris dimmed the lights in her office, put her feet up on her desk, and closed her eyes. Her elevator reverie had been haunting her like a partially remembered dream, and she needed to bring it forward. It involved the value of life, Chris thought, the value of human life versus other forms of life. Something else, though, something Sue had said came into it. The idea of medicine having gotten to the point where things were 'beyond the rational'.

Was that the key, the common denominator? In the name of medical technology, people wrote themselves blank checks of authority to inflict other animals with dreadful diseases because, ultimately, it might maintain human life. Deidre could not be allowed that final authority over her own life, however. Medical technology could only be used to maintain life where humans were concerned. Which takes us back to the relative values of human versus other animal life, Chris mused.

Margaret valued the lives of those dogs to the extent that she wouldn't let them suffer for what she considered was a marketing gimmick. The vaccine was not needed, she had argued in her letters, because vaccines against rabies already existed.

Deidre, on the other hand, wanted to relinquish her life, because it was no longer possible to live it fully. No, Chris thought, I really don't believe that. But that's what Deidre had said, or more accurately, that's what Sue had said Deidre wanted. Chris took her feet off the desk, sat up, and leaned forward. Sue and Dawes were shocked by Margaret and Heppert's action, Chris realized, and she was shocked by Deidre's desire to die; neither seemed true to their respective personalities.

Chris found Bailey and told her she'd be upstairs, then hurried to Deidre's room and sent Dawes to the cafeteria for an early lunch.

"Do you still want to die?" Chris whispered, moving the chair very close to Deidre's bed.

"Yes," Deidre tried to nod, but Chris could see that it disturbed her still-fragile equilibrium.

"Tell me why," Chris whispered, then shook her head and began again. "No, don't tell me the reasons you gave Sue. Tell me your real reason."

Deidre smiled and looked at her. From the way her eyes seemed to focus, Chris suspected her vision was indeed getting better, just as Langford had mentioned when she stopped by ER that morning. Langford had shook her head with wonder over it, marveling that Deidre was responding so quickly to the prednisone. Chris was more inclined to credit Deidre's recuperative powers. And someone with such powers, she knew, would hardly be the type to give up so easily.

"Sue," Deidre whispered.

"Maybe Sue doesn't want her life so simplified," Chris argued.

"No, she wouldn't," Deidre agreed, "but she doesn't know," Deidre had to stop and breathe deeply before continuing, "how short life is."

Chris looked away to give herself time to digest Deidre's meaning. Then she looked back, and found Deidre's calm expression, waiting patiently.

"Your life isn't over, either."

"It's time, though," Deidre responded simply. Then, after waiting a bit, she continued. "Fearful to assume that responsibility. But I must."

"Must I?"

Deidre smiled, tilted her head a little like Dawes would, and allowed, "Only if you're ready."

"You're very precious to us," Chris tried to explain, and realized she'd held out her hands, palms upward, as if in supplication.

"That won't change," Deidre assured her.

"But you will be gone from our lives."

"Only this body." Deidre took more breaths, then added, "You will see me in each other's eyes."

"Not your eyes, Deidre," she answered. Chris felt tears drip onto her hands, and wiped at her cheeks in wonder. She hadn't expected to cry. She was mourning this woman's death already.

"Chris?" Her voice, not a whisper but a clear note, brought Chris back up to look again at those eyes. "I'm so glad," Deidre breathed and resumed her whisper, "we finally know each other, like each other so much. I love feeling like this."

They were silent then, for however long the time was until Dawes returned. She entered with one of the floor nurses, which gave Chris an excuse for taking her leave without the physical contact that might have betrayed her emotions. She hurried to the elevator, and was relieved to find it empty when she got in, leaned against the side rail, and began to tremble. She steadied herself with long inhalations by the time the doors opened, walked briskly to the ER supply room, unlocked the door, and entered. Chris knew where the syringes were, but had to search a bit for the right vial.

* * *

She sat at her desk and stared down into the open side drawer. Chris would give it to them, she was sure. She just needed time to let it sink in. She wondered, though, if she would be able to continue doing her job. For years, she'd been taking responsibility for keeping people alive without asking their wishes, people who were in the worst possible condition: burn victims, patients from auto accidents with severed spinal cords, head injuries who would arguably have been better off dead.

Once she acknowledged they might feel other than grateful for Chris' efforts, the split-second decisions now required of her would be impossible. Add to that a germinating sense of responsibility beyond simply making a dying patient as comfortable as possible, and Chris sensed she was becoming mired in a swamp of questions.

She thought of the old attitude, still practiced in some countries, whereby terminal patients were not told they would soon die. That seemed barbaric now. Someday, would it seem barbaric to deny a patient's right to choose the time and method for a less agonized, more dignified exit? In Deidre's case, it seemed barbaric now.

Chris realized she didn't care that she would be breaking civil law and professional tenet by her action. I'm a lesbian, she shrugged. My very existence breaks laws. I know those laws evolved from well-intentioned, civilizing customs into blindly followed rules which only sustain an obsolete, ancient strategy for human survival.

That was the key, she realized; the connection she had perceived subconsciously between Margaret and Heppert and Deidre. They each had accepted that life is more complicated than the rules suggest. That Human Life as the first priority was the rule here, Chris saw. But this rule was being observed in a vacuum, as though it were a stainless steel blade without a particle of historic dust, slicing through a squeaky clean, timeless atmosphere in a sterile room: as though Human Life were an unattached, cold, hard fact by itself, rather than the soft, mushy, intergrown part of a living whole it actually was.

How did such aberrations of truth occur, she wondered, then saw the answer in her own actions. Working it out every time was more than most of us can do. "I'm only human," Chris smiled. But now and then, she thought, we're forced to. Sooner or later, a rule causes more problems than it solves. Chris thought of Margaret and Heppert, two faceless women in the riotous company of twenty dogs, and shook her head.

"Good luck, you two," she muttered, and softly shut her desk drawer.

* * *

Sue brought news along with Chris' car to the hospital that evening. As she related the story of her two encounters with the police, Chris wondered if they didn't owe Heppert a favor. What Deidre had labelled Operation Beagle now occupied their minds as much as Deidre's condition.

Chris could see that Sue wasn't faking her interest in the situation. Heightened energy shone from her eyes as she told them of the pair of officers, a man and woman, who arrived at the house just as she was parking Chris' car in the driveway. They had shown Sue the warrant, Sue had taken them to Heppert's apartment and waited while they searched thoroughly.

"I thought my heart would stop when the guy nodded to our garage and asked who used it," Sue said, her eyes wide at Dawes. I told him the garage was Deidre's. He asked me if I would open it. The woman goes, 'You understand, our search warrant doesn't necessarily cover the garage if the suspect doesn't use it.' The guy actually glared at her!"

"Maybe they were playing 'good cop, bad cop' like Cagney and Lacey," Dawes grinned.

"You know," Sue laughed, "I thought about that. Then I figured, no, these two don't look like they'd get along well enough to pull off something like that. Deidre, I really wished you were there, to help me deal with them."

"What happened," Deidre demanded, "about car?"

"They asked me to open the garage," Sue shrugged. "I figured that if I refused, saying it was Deidre's, they'd go get a search warrant and we'd look pretty bad when they saw the plates were gone. It probably wouldn't work as a stall, either. Even if I could have thought of some way to get plates for the car or get rid of the car before they returned with a warrant, one of them probably would have stayed there to keep an eye on the garage until the other returned. So I opened it."

"The guy goes, 'Whose car?' I said, 'Deidre's.' He walks along the side, looking in the windows, as though he hasn't noticed the plates are missing. He says, 'She doesn't drive it?' I answered, 'She's in the hospital. I told you before?' I'm so wrapped up in worrying about the damn plates, I'm waiting for a specific question, like, 'Where are the license plates?' He was asking that, but in a round about way, and I was thinking he'd forgotten what I'd told him about Deidre. He goes, 'Yeah, I understand. With MS. She gonna sell it?'"

"The woman goes, 'John! For chrissake!'" Sue laughed and shook her head. "Turns out he's in the market for a good used car. His partner was so disgusted with him, she walked out of the garage!"

"Didn't she wonder where the plates were?" Chris asked.

Sue shrugged, "Apparently not."

"People switch plates all the time," Dawes interjected, "let other people use them if the original vehicle is totalled or not in use. Even sell them. They weren't interested in getting mixed up in some little thing like that. Funny. They are so comfortable with the shady side of people, they missed an important connection."

"I have an even better piece of news," Sue smiled at Deidre. "They came back late this afternoon, to unseal the apartment. They told me the charge was reduced to petty larceny. Nothing else can stick."

"What about the explosion," Chris asked. "Isn't that a felony?"

Sue laughed, "You're going to love this! There was no 'explosion.' Those two blew up a couple of rubber gloves on the ends of air hoses, as a diversion while they got out through an alarmed door. The guards reported an explosion when they called for the fire department, because that's what they thought had happened at the time. That's what went on the 911 log, which is where the media got its first information, and that's what everybody thought until the police released the facts of its investigation. It should be on the news tonight."

"Breaking and entering?" Deidre asked.

"They never broke in, Babe," Sue smiled at her. "They were in. They didn't even 'break out.' It was a fire door. They pushed it open, and left."

"I wonder if the FBI will pull out of it then," Dawes mused.

"They are out of it," Sue nodded. "The woman told me that the FBI only came into it because PetLove's chief exec has pull in Washington and tried to paint it as some big animal rights terrorist conspiracy. I guess some checking into Margaret and Heppert's backgrounds couldn't pull up any connections that way, and since the dogs had only been valued at $45 each on PetLove's last inventory for tax purposes, it didn't look like that big a case after all."

"They were worth more to Margaret," Deidre whispered.

"Do you think, when they hear the charge, they'll turn themselves in?" Chris asked.

"I would wait, if I were them," Dawes mused. "If the climate changes for animal rights, they might be able to come back with a full pardon."

"But how long would they have to wait?" Sue asked.

"If they give themselves up now," Dawes shrugged, "they would probably never be pardoned."

"Not everyone can tolerate exile, D," Chris reminded her that she might be viewing it from a singular viewpoint.

"'We're all of us refugees,'" Deidre countered with the line from J. Calvi's lyrics, then brightened with, "Can I tell my news?"

"I think it's a good time," Chris agreed.

"If you're willing to have your roommate back, I should be able to come home next week."

Sue smiled into Deidre's eyes, kissed her lips gently, and nodded.

So much for the diversion of Margaret and Heppert, Chris thought.

Before Chris and Dawes left, the four discussed the logistics of Deidre's homecoming and whether to hire a nurse. They decided, between the four of them, they could handle whatever came up.

"Besides," Sue reminded them, "if Margaret and Heppert try to contact us, we don't need witnesses."

But, as the days passed into weeks and they began to settle into a routine which revolved around Deidre, they heard nothing from the pair. On paper, Deidre sold the car to Dawes, who licensed it and even drove it now and then to the store, feeling somehow she might be helping Margaret and Heppert by the charade. The "Doggie Duo," Sue's code name for them, had apparently eluded the police. On her last visit Officer Berens, the woman of the team assigned the case, told Sue that only pressure from PetLove's CEO was keeping it open.

"I guess he took it kind of personally," she smirked. "The oral rabies vaccine thing had been his idea." But pressure and publicity from a women's coalition and animal rights groups were working against him, she added.

After Berens left, Deidre said, "I wish they could let us know somehow that they are all right." Her voice was almost the timbre Chris had remembered. Each week seemed to add more strength to her movements, another fiber of life to her body. Chris felt herself living in a delicate balance, watching Deidre's will overcome the devastation of that last attack. How long would Deidre want to wait, Chris wondered. There would be a point, she knew, beyond which she would not recuperate: perhaps her vision would clear a little more, someday she would stand again on her own, perhaps she would even walk, painfully.

Chris had not discussed it with Dawes since they watched the sunset from the helipad. One night, curled together in their bed, Dawes murmured, "Sue is not writing. Have you noticed?"

"No, I just assumed she was writing during the day while I was at the hospital. Are you sure?"

"When she is writing, she leaves papers around, books opened on the floor of the room where she works, the manuscript she's working on she leaves out on the desk. It has been clean in there for weeks."

"Maybe we should get an aide to come in, D. At least during the mornings, so she can work. She's probably spending all her time with Deidre."

"Taking care of Deidre does require most of her time," Dawes agreed. "But Sue could write in the evenings."

"We're there then. Perhaps we're a distraction."

"No," Dawes sighed, looking up at the ceiling. "That would be the perfect excuse to work, while we were there with Deidre. No, it is what Deidre feared would happen. Sue is shutting down, wrapping herself in Deidre's pain."

"What do you mean? Empathy?"

"Yes, of a sort. Deidre is dying, and Sue is dying with her."

Chris thought of how Sue's appearance had struck her just a few hours before. She had observed such rapid changes in members of patients' families before--more than simply exhaustion, a kind of accelerated aging evidenced by deeper lines in the face and graying hair. In the light of the bedside lamp, Sue's face as she smiled down into Deidre's had looked suddenly old.

"Deidre is getting better, though," Chris argued.

"For now, she can move a little better, see a little clearer," Dawes agreed, "but this is still the worst Sue has ever seen. And we all know it will get bad again someday."

* * *

Two days later, Sue and Deidre arrived again by ambulance to the ER. Deidre had tried to get up on her own and had fallen, knocked her mother's antique hurricane lamp to the floor, and gashed her arm on the shards. It was a nasty wound, cutting into a large vein which Chris had to repair before closing. As Chris was suturing the laceration, Deidre explained she had tried to stand because she had felt chest pains, like indigestion, and needed to be upright.

"Chest pains?" Chris looked up from Deidre's arm.

"I guess I've been eating too many meals in bed," Deidre replied calmly, her eyes holding Chris' steady. "Bad for proper digestion."

Chris had Bailey hook Deidre up to an EKG, and continued suturing. The readout was relatively normal, Chris decided, staring at it while Bailey finished bandaging Deidre's arm. When Bailey left the treatment cubicle, Deidre asked Chris if she would be putting the EKG into her chart.

"Yes, of course," Chris answered, aware that Deidre was locking eyes with her again.

"And you will make a note of the chest pains?" Deidre whispered.

A sigh escaped from Chris, who now understood. She nodded, "I'll go get Sue and let her know we're done." Chris sent Sue in to wait with Deidre, walked into her office, to her desk, and removed the vial of potassium chloride and syringe. Back in the cubicle, she handed the vial and syringe to Sue, who put them carefully into her hip pack.

"I'll see you at dinner?" Chris asked, watching Deidre's face carefully.

"Oh, yes," Deidre reached for Chris' hand and squeezed it reassuringly. "D will be home from her charter, too, won't she?"

"Yes, she's due in by three this afternoon," Chris answered, and wondered if Deidre had timed all this so Chris would have Dawes at home with her. "Sue, why don't you and Deidre take my car home, then send D for me this evening?"

Chris watched them pull out of the driveway, and hoped Deidre would still be there when Dawes came for her. She started to face what she had just done, pushed the realization away, and hurried back to where she had left Deidre's chart. She had some careful notes to enter.

That evening at dinner, Sue and Deidre announced it was time to have a party. Of course, Chris thought, but smiled and nodded agreement when Deidre said from her wheelchair that they'd all been cooped up too long.

"If we can't go out to see our friends," she offered, "let's have them all in here." Then, looking from one to the next of the three women at the table with her, she added, "And we'll drink a toast to Margaret and Heppert, all of us together."

After supper, while Dawes was busy planning with Deidre, Sue joined Chris in the kitchen as she washed dishes. Not looking at Chris, but standing very close, Sue whispered, "Chris, I broke it."

"What?"

"The vial! God, don't tell Deidre. She's knows I'm a klutz and will worry that I won't do this right. I was hiding it in the basement--you know how dim it is with only that one bulb--I pulled a loose brick out of the wall to hide it behind, and dropped the brick on the vial."

Chris looked at Sue stricken face. She was looking down at her feet, and Chris imagined Sue was seeing the brick fall again, the vial being smashed. "You were going to hide the vial in the basement?" Chris asked gently.

"I know, not really necessary, right? But that's where we planned to hide it afterwards, with the syringe. Just in case."

Chris then understood. She was actually glad to know they were thinking it out beyond Deidre's death. She doubted, though, that Sue had been involved in Deidre's slashing her own arm, being sure to catch a vein in the process, to provide Sue with an undetectable injection site.

"I'll get another one tomorrow. What did you do with the old one?"

"Cleaned it up, put it in a bag and left it down there in the hiding place. I can get rid of it along with the new vial after..."

"All right," Chris nodded. "You still have the syringe?"

"Yeah, it's fine. I brought it back up here and hid it behind the towels in the linen closet."

"I think that's a better place," Chris reassured her.

"Chris?" Sue looked back down at her feet. "Don't tell Deidre, okay?"

"Okay," Chris lied.

Chris slipped a new vial to Sue the next evening before dinner. While Sue and Dawes were busy with the dishes afterward, Chris told Deidre that she had given Sue a replacement, speaking as though she assumed Deidre knew the first had been broken.

Chris watched Deidre's face as she spoke. A slow smile spread across Deidre's mouth, and she looked up into Chris' eyes. "I wondered," she began, "I heard the noise, and was afraid something like that had happened, but Sue didn't tell me she'd broken it. Don't tell her you told me," Deidre implored. "She's probably embarrassed about it or doesn't want to worry me with any of it, Chris." Chris, relieved, agreed to keep it all to herself.


	8. The Coming Out Party

"Let's call it a coming out ball," Deidre suggested, "for Heppert and Margaret--we can hope can't we? We'll make it black tie. We haven't had a party like that in the community for such a long time!" 

"Formal gowns?" Chris, dismayed, looked to Dawes for a way to gently veto the idea.

Dawes countered with, "Tuxes? We can rent them near the university."

"Of course tuxes," Sue laughed. "Can you imagine me in a gown?"

"I refuse to imagine any woman in a gown, but you would be particularly distressing," Dawes shook her head.

"I've never worn a tux," Chris smiled at the idea, greatly relieved.

"I did once before," Deidre said, looking at Sue. "I felt very elegant. Costumes are a wonderful way to celebrate."

"Our tenth anniversary," Sue nodded. "That was quite a party."

"Edward will want to wear a gown," Deidre commented. "Of course, he looks quite--attractive. Why is that?"

"He has better taste in dresses than Sue?" Dawes earned a glare from Sue.

"Perhaps," Chris offered, "it's because a man risks nothing by donning the uniform of the simply decorative. It is only a costume for him. He sheds the subservient role with the gown."

"And wearing tuxes is fun for us," Sue added, "because we don't really become rich Republicans."

"And we look better in them than they do," Dawes concluded.

* * *

Chris looked up at her reflection as she pulled on her white tuxedo jacket. Flashes of the several times in her life when she'd mustered all her control had interrupted each stage of dressing. Tonight would be the sum of those times--first surgical procedure, burying her parents, burying Alicia.

Yesterday's conversation with Deidre replayed like a song whose lyrics she wanted to memorize. Deidre had touched her arm as they sat together on the patio, the sounds of Sue and Dawes cleaning up in the kitchen after dinner drifting through the screen door.

"Will you be all right?" Deidre had murmured, looking very deeply into her eyes.

"I don't think I can talk about it," Chris had whispered back.

"Wheel me into the yard."

When they had gone beyond the feeders, Deidre held up her hand, and Chris took it as she moved around to crouch before Deidre's chair.

"You haven't talked to D yet, have you?"

Chris shook her head.

"You must. You mustn't go through this alone."

"I thought, perhaps, you or Sue would have told her."

"It's not our place, dear. It's you and D now, together. You are sharing each other's life now."

Chris knew she was right, that she should have told Dawes weeks ago.

"I know I must prepare her," Chris conceded. She thought of how desperately sad Dawes would be without Deidre.

"D will be ready, Chris. It's you I'm worried about."

But I'm the one who deals with death all the time, Chris thought. What do Dawes and Sue know of it?

Deidre held Chris' face within the palms of her hands. Softly, tenderly, a breeze rustled leaves above Deidre's head and played across their skin.

"You're still reaching to hold onto me, my love. They have me tucked away safely in their hearts. That's where I want to be for you, as well. You won't lose me, Chris. I've already been here with you."

"You'll be dead," Chris whispered, tormented by the meaning of her words.

"When I was a child," Deidre began, "I was terrified of the dark. I don't know why precisely, but I vaguely recall a sense that, because I couldn't see what was there, there was nothing there--a total void. I was horrified, I suppose, at the possibility of such a dearth of feeling, perhaps the ultimate loneliness."

She smoothed Chris' hair, smiled when Chris responded by leaning her head into the caress. "Sometime in my process of growing up, I realized that everything was still there in the darkness. My eyes, simply because of their structure, were incapable of perceiving that fact."

"You believe in an afterlife." Chris nodded, preparing to hide that she did not.

Deidre smiled, tilted her head, and chuckled. "Not necessarily. Besides, what I believe won't help you deal with how you feel."

"Then what...?"

"I no longer am afraid of the darkness, because I've never been able to discover or create total emptiness. Have you?"

"Of course not."

"Because, no matter how empty the universe seems around you, you're always there, so it's not empty."

Chris was beginning to understand where Deidre wanted her to follow. "I can't lose you totally, then, because I'll remember you." Simplistic, she thought, but wanted to believe Deidre was holding out a truth to her. She knew Deidre had the right to leave, what she was fighting now was the realization, the pain, of what that loss would mean to those left behind.

Deidre nodded. "It's not just the memory of loving. It's having loved, loving still, knowing that feeling and sharing it."

Dawes moved into her reflection, slowly wrapped her arms around Chris, and whispered in her ear. "Please don't be so sad. We celebrate her life tonight. It's to be a happy time."

"You know." Chris watched Dawes' reflection watching hers.

"Why else would they want this party? You decided to help Deidre, after she cut her arm?"

"Before, actually. But I waited until that incident to do anything definite." Chris explained about the vial of potassium chloride and syringe. "She will appear to have had a heart attack."

Dawes closed her eyes, breathed deeply, exhaled slowly. She rubbed her head gently against Chris, saying, "You are very brave, and very kind."

* * *

Most of the guests wore tuxes, Chris observed, peering through the back door into the yard. She was watching Deidre closely, for signs of exhaustion or increased pain, but so far she seemed remarkably well. 

A small crowd, its members changing periodically, remained around Deidre, who sat in a chair on the patio where Chris had first met her. Deidre had banned the wheelchair from the yard, and Sue had removed it after transferring her to the patio chair.

Chris stepped back from the door to make room for several women to pass through, and noticed Dawes watching her from the front hallway. Dawes excused herself from the group of women she'd been conversing with, and walked the length of the hallway to stand next to Chris and look through the door.

"How is your patient, Doctor?" Dawes asked softly, close to Chris' ear.

"Remarkable," Chris reported.

"Yes," Dawes smiled, her eyes filling. She whispered, "I love you very much," and brushed the side of Chris' face with her fingers.

Chris' throat constricted, but she turned away and fought down her own tears. She turned back with, "Is it time for the toast yet?"

They made sure everyone had something to drink, and directed them all out to the yard. Sue stood on the patio table to give the toast, which she and Deidre had composed.

"We decided to hold this toast out here, not just because it is the only place to fit you all together at one time, but because we wanted to surround ourselves with a reminder. From this point outward, the city spreads, encircles two small lakes and banishes a great deal that is not human or human made. Parks and gardens like this one help us feel a little less isolated from ourselves, our natures."

As Sue spoke, light began to angle in, growing the shade to deep shadow in the recesses of the yard. Hawk moths, hovering like hummingbirds at the low, colorful mounds of impatiens, shared the air with butterflies and dragonflies. Birds which had quit the feeders for higher, more prudent distance from the people gathering below, voiced their own communications as the sun began to lower.

"This evening we gather to toast a pair of us who cannot be here. We hope they are safe and well, and know that we love them." Sue smiled down at Deidre, who sat smiling to herself, her eyes closed. Sue pulled a slip of paper from the pocket of her tux jacket, and read as the faint orange and violet of sunset began to tint the evening light.

"Man insists on sanitizing life by denying death, reducing its meaning to the moment life ceases; and sterilizing his culture by elevating, isolating, human life, reducing the importance and interconnectedness of all other life around us. This sterilization process, technology, has brought us to a juncture, a question. Could we have missed the significance of the differences between us and other creatures? By some hubris, could we be confusing the opportunity to learn with the right to exploit?"

Sue then raised her glass, and the women in the garden raised theirs.

"We toast the blessing that is life and all those who know it is a blessing. We toast the spirit within us that guides us to share life, hope, knowledge, wonder, and love with all and everything connected. We toast our faith in life as a rejection of violence and cruelty, and in death as an important passage of life, not a black hole into which living creatures can be driven to become meaningless. As life matters, death matters. As we have purpose, destiny, and worth, so do all creatures with whom we share what remains to us a mystery." She looked down again at Deidre, who looked from Sue to Dawes and then to Chris.

"To Margaret Fisher and Rosemarie Heppert," Deidre called out, in a strong, clear voice.

Soon after the toast, as natural light began to dim, everyone drifted into the house. Some were following Deidre, whom Sue had carried in, and some were being chased in by the inevitable mosquitos.

"So much for nature," Deidre had grinned, as Sue lifted her from her chair on the patio.

"Well," Sue answered, "they have to eat, too. I just don't want them eating us."

Deidre continued well through the evening, and Chris marvelled at how she had said goodbye to everyone there without their knowing it. Guest after guest, Chris overheard Deidre tell how that particular friend and she had shared a certain experience, funny or sad or amazing. Special friends, Chris thought, and wanted to remember their faces, to be able to recognize them later.

But when the last guests waved back from their car as they pulled away from the curb, Deidre suddenly looked exhausted.

"It was a lovely party," she smiled widely to Sue, who knelt before her wheelchair, kissed her hand.

"Let me get you ready for bed," Sue murmured to her, and Deidre nodded.

"Come in, in a bit?" Deidre called to Dawes and Chris over her shoulder as Sue wheeled her out of the living room and down the hallway.

"Yes, we need to straighten up out here," Dawes answered, "then we'll be in to say goodnight." Her voice had seemed quite normal as she spoke with her back to Chris. But when Dawes turned, she raised clenched fists and held them to her temples silently. Then she gathered Chris into her arms, unable to speak. After a bit, they both began to move about the room, carrying food to the kitchen, straightening cushions.

Sue called softly from the bedroom door. Chris went to Deidre first, and kissed her gently on the cheek. Deidre held her eyes for a long moment.

"Thank you," she whispered. "Because of you, everything will be as it should."

Looking in those eyes, Chris was sure she was right. She leaned close and kissed Deidre's cheek again, whispering, "We'll take care of Sue." As she pulled back to look again, Deidre's face had changed. She looked very young, and very happy.

"I know," she said.

Chris exchanged places with Dawes, and moved to stand in the doorway. As Dawes bent in close to speak with Deidre, Chris turned away and saw Sue, who waited in the hall. Sue smiled calmly at her. Peaceful, Chris thought, and wondered at her strength. Then, Deidre gives such strength, her thoughts replied.

Chris' attention was drawn back to Deidre as she overheard Dawes murmur, "Sleep well."

Chris could not see Dawes' face, but Deidre smiled lovingly and played her fingers through Dawes' soft, black curls.

"You looked so sexy tonight," Deidre chuckled, then looked past Dawes to Chris, and finally to Sue as she moved back into the room. "All three of you were such a thrilling sight," she grinned. "Go to bed now. Sweet dreams."

Sue followed them to the back door. "Are you sure," Chris asked one last time, "you want to be alone?"

"Yes," Sue wrapped her arms around Chris and hugged. "We've thought and talked a long time. Everything will be fine."

* * *

When Chris awoke, light was streaming in through the windows. She was surprised that she had slept; her last conscious memory was of lying close to Dawes and thinking they both would be unable to sleep that night. Then she heard Sue's voice and realized it was that which had awakened her.

Dawes bolted upright as Chris grabbed for her robe. They ran to the stairs, Sue's screams making Chris feel she was moving through a slow motion nightmare. The back door was unlocked, and they found Sue on the floor in the hallway by the linen closet.

"What in god's name?" Dawes whispered, but Chris knew, even before she took the crumpled note from Sue's fist.

"Why?" Sue sobbed, looking toward the bedroom door. "Why didn't you let me come with you?"

"Susan," Dawes whispered, returning from the bedroom and kneeling by her side, "what are you saying?"

"Read," Chris said, handing her the note. While Dawes read, Chris gently took the syringe from Sue's fist. "Stay with her," she instructed, and gathered up the two empty vials. Sue had emptied one into the syringe for Deidre as planned, the second had probably been empty when Sue retrieved it from the back of the linen closet.

She entered the bedroom, and stood by the bed where Deidre lay. The bandage on her arm was unwound halfway, to the point where Sue would have eased the needle into the still-healing wound. Chris carefully rewound the bandage. She tried to imagine the effort it must have taken Deidre to find that second vial where Sue had hidden it beyond the first one under the towels, fill the syringe, empty it (where--toward the back of the closet?) and replace it before anyone knew. She would have left the note with the empty vial. Chris pressed gently on the tape at Deidre's wrist, smoothing it, and held her lifeless hand.

Deidre had wanted her death to look like a heart attack in her sleep, and Sue had acted out her wishes until she was sure Deidre was gone. Chris shook her head, trying to follow Sue's reasoning. Surely, Deidre's plan was to hide their involvement. But Sue's death, healthy as she was, would evoke suspicion. What the hell was she thinking? Chris found herself growing angry as she left the room and hurried to the basement to find Sue's hiding place for the vials and syringe.

The hallway was empty when she returned. She found Dawes and Sue in the bedroom, looking down at Deidre.

"We need to destroy the note," Chris said to Dawes, and reached out to take it from her.

"Are you sure, Chris?" Dawes handed it to her saying, "Read it again, the last part."

Deidre's handwriting, reduced to a trembling series of block letters, was difficult to decipher. But Chris was able to piece together that last paragraph Dawes wanted her to consider.

"Sue, you will forgive me when you understand," Deidre had scrawled, "and as you heal, you will understand, remembering all the ways you filled my life with joy. I have to finish my life so you can go on. You will realize, when you open up again, that I never left you. I've been there all along." Chris knew she would treasure the last sentence: "Let D and Chris keep you safe until you're ready to live again."

"You're right," she handed the note back to Dawes, who put it in the pocket of her robe. "it's to be read again later."

Sue, pale and staring, murmured, "We might as well destroy mine." She pulled a folded piece of paper out of her pocket, and handed it to Chris.

"You had us covered after all," Chris whispered, after reading the note. To Dawes' questioning look, "She apologizes to me for having taken my keys and stolen the vials and syringe from the ER supply room while I was suturing Deidre's arm."

Sue began to sob quietly, and Chris instructed Dawes to stay with her while she left the room to make the necessary phone calls.

* * *

Deidre had not wanted a funeral. She had contacted the university's medical school several years before, and arranged for them to receive her body when the time came. Chris had always advocated such donations, but when they had to let it happen, giving Deidre up was very hard. Sue was still staring into nothingness much of the time, and Chris hoped her numbness saved her at least the ache of giving up Deidre's body.

Deidre had, however, thought of how they all might need a way to come together again, especially Sue. Dawes told her Deidre's plan as the three climbed into Dawes' thankfully large bed. Chris and Dawes had brought Sue upstairs with them the first night, and kept her with them for the several days since. She had cried quietly through the first night while Chris held her, but had been sleeping better since.

"A softball game?" Chris asked.

"That is what she wanted," Dawes smiled.

"D, I'm lousy at softball."

"No women's softball game is complete without adoring fans," Dawes grinned.

"That's how Deidre and I finally got together," Sue explained. "I was her adoring fan. You and I can lead the cheering section."

It was the most Sue had spoken in three days, Chris realized. Oh, sweet Deidre, she thought, you knew how to heal. While Chris resumed her duties at the hospital, Dawes and Sue spent the next week reserving a field, getting the teams together, and organizing a picnic for after the game. Each day, Dawes reported that Sue had spent less time with her eyes unfocused. Sue decided to sleep on Dawes' sofabed by the end of the week.

"We missed you," Chris kissed her goodbye as she left for the hospital the next morning.


	9. Sliding Home

"I hear Sillie," Heppert listened, picking out the unique bay from nineteen others, all of them singing for their breakfast.

Margaret squirmed closer, being careful to avoid the crack between the shoved-together twin beds. They had insisted on taking the spare room so Becca and Tony could return to their bed in the loft. It was the right thing to do, Heppert would remind herself whenever she or Margaret got caught in the San Andreas Fault on the way to each other.

"Baba's playing with her. Hear the change in her voice?"

"Um hmmm," Margaret growled into Heppert's neck. "Rosemarie, you're not supposed to laugh. I'm being sexy." Margaret slid up and down the length of her body. Heppert was particularly conscious of Margaret's breasts gliding over her shoulder blades, and the wet warmth sliding along the back of her thigh.

"You're always sexy. What you're being right now is provocative."

"Is it working?" Margaret slid down farther, reached gently in.

"Oh, I think so," Heppert tried to turn over, but Margaret pinned her, and continued to move her fingers. She spread her legs to push Heppert's farther apart, all the while tracking her fingers in a slow pattern, never entering, but skimming the increasingly moist rim. As her temperature climbed, Heppert thought of the crevice between the beds with a whole new meaning.

"Margaret, please," Heppert pressed her forehead into the mattress. "Go in me or let me up. This is driving me crazy."

Margaret's answer was a slow, gentle nibble on Heppert's ear to match the delicate pattern her fingers continued to course. Heppert pushed herself up in an attempt to flip over, struggling as Margaret tried to keep her pinned. She was straining at her utmost when Margaret suddenly slipped her fingers inside and pressed. They fell back to the bed, Heppert spasming fiercely as Margaret pulled her leg up to increase the pressure. Heppert grabbed the pillow and pulled it around her face.

When Heppert quieted, Margaret slid to her side, her face close, her eyes soft. 

"I love you, Rosemarie," she smiled, and played her fingers through the short, red hair at Heppert's brow.

"I love you, too, Margaret. I just wish you were better at making love."

Becca called, then knocked at the door. Margaret pulled a sheet over them and invited her in.

"I thought maybe you two had smuggled one of the pups in here," she grinned. "Then, I realized you were howling for your breakfast, too." She placed two mugs of coffee on the nightstand.

"We fed the dogs since we were up early. It wouldn't hurt you to stay in bed for a change," she added, waving her hand in the air at their protests. She walked back to the door and found Tony waiting for her. "Right?"

Tony smiled slowly, assessing the damage. "Good job, Peggy. Rosie looks downright vegetative."

"Get out of here, woman. I don't want you getting any ideas this close to leaving for work." Becca shoved her into the hall with, "We'll see you when we get home. Tony will pick up that sandpaper you need on her lunch hour."

They sat, sipping coffee, and listened to Becca and Tony's engine carry them down the lane to the road. Heppert let her mind drift away, trying to avoid a now familiar sadness that followed the quiet.

"I miss going to work, too," Margaret rubbed Heppert's back as she spoke softly. "Just another couple of weeks, and we'll be done painting the van. When we're safe into Canada, we'll figure out a way to get jobs."

"I've never asked you, Margaret. How are you going to feel in the kind of jobs we're going to have to take?"

"You mean in the kind of jobs we'll be lucky to get? I thought of that long ago, dear. I'll miss the science, but it's tainted now. Somehow, I can't romanticize it anymore, because every part of it is linked to something I deplore. Actually, I think I miss what I used to feel about it more than I'll ever miss the work itself, as much as I enjoyed it."

Heppert understood. She used to love the ocean--could walk for hours along the shore listening to gulls overhead, the steady, ancient cadence of waves pulsing against land--until last summer's vacation. She'd stood, wrapped within a lingering, late-morning fog on one of the string of beaches along the New Jersey shore. She was unable to walk any farther, the wet sand ahead now a minefield of filthy debris left by the receding tide.

It wasn't brown, tangled seaweed or rotting fish tossed up by a storm, but garbage: the treacherous refuse of a densely packed, human population crammed up against this last line of nature's defense. She turned and followed the soft dents of her footprints back to her motel room, checked out, and drove the congested highways to her mother's house in Elizabeth. The ocean still played the same soundtrack under the same moon, bounced the same gull cries back to the sky, but Heppert knew she'd rearranged the score. Now she would barely hear the ocean's primal sounds through a cacophony of traffic--human and mechanical. All the space was taken between her and the ocean.

"Rosemarie?" Margaret called her back through her reverie. "It's going to be all right," she smiled, and Heppert felt a surge of love as she looked into Margaret's eyes. This was something a little different, something that had been coming to her slowly in these weeks since they'd first made love.

"I know it will. No matter what happens," Heppert smiled and kissed her softly, "I know it will be all right."

"Then, let's get dressed and go paint that van, woman," Margaret commanded.

* * *

Heppert might not have even noticed, if she hadn't stopped to stretch just when Baba, hackles up, walked past her. The husky growled very quietly, staring directly up the hill in which the van was hidden.

"Margaret," Heppert whispered, but the rasp of sandpaper against van continued. "Margaret!" Heppert said louder. Baba growled a low warning again, and the sanding ceased.

Baba took a step forward, but Heppert reached for her collar. "Please, Baba, don't get mad at me," she whispered, "but I'd rather you stayed down here with us."

Margaret stepped out from behind the van. She froze, staring at Heppert, when the sound of voices reached their ears. Children, Heppert thought, playing in the woods and approaching the crest of the hill above them. Baba growled, and pulled to be released.

Margaret reached for her collar, whispering "Baba, no. Be quiet," and led the dog back behind the van.

Heppert followed, pulling shut the cave's gate behind them. She concentrated, trying to decipher words, grasp the meaning of exclamations. There were two, maybe three, she thought, and different ages, perhaps. It was difficult to hear from within the cave. Pressing her ear against an opening in the gate didn't help much.

The voices were fading. Heppert slowly opened the gate, thankful that Becca and Tony had oiled its hinges in the restoration process. She stepped out slowly. The children were definitely leaving, but not necessarily returning in the direction whence they'd come.

"They could come back this way, if they're continuing in one direction," she told Margaret, who nodded.

"Come on, Baba. I'm afraid we're spending the rest of the afternoon in the house."

Heppert locked the gate behind them as Margaret led the dog back to the cabin.

"Do you think they saw the beagles?" Heppert asked, looking over at the kennel from the cabin's porch.

"I doubt it. Children? They'd be down here like a swarm, to pet them."

"Then back to their parents to tell them what cute puppies they saw?"

"That would be my guess," Margaret frowned.

Heppert walked over to the woodshed and came out with a hatchet and an axe. Margaret joined her, frowning even more deeply. Heppert held the tools out toward her.

"Choose yer pie-zon," she growled.

"Rosemarie, what...?" Margaret gaped from the axe to Heppert's face and back again to the axe.

"Hurry, Margaret. Take one or the other. We'll have to cut down quite a few little pine trees to block the view into that kennel."

"Oh, Rosemarie, I thought you meant..." Margaret took the hatchet, shaking her head.

Heppert read her face. "You thought I wanted to kill the dogs?" She laid the axe on the ground, took the hatchet back from Margaret and placed it next to the axe. Then she pulled Margaret in close to her, hugging her tightly to stop a tremor that had begun in her stomach.

"I will say it again, Margaret. You're not the odd one in this. You're not the only one who thinks those dogs have just as much right to live. We're going to get them safely out of here, to a place where we know they'll be permanently out of danger." She pulled back, looked into Margaret's eyes which were now threatening to overflow. "I'm not just here so I can be in your bed. I'm here because I know you're right, and they were wrong."

"I do know that, Rosemarie."

"Then, let's get busy."

* * *

"We knew something had happened, as soon as we saw that miniature pine forest around the kennel," Tony nodded. "Did they come back?"

"If they did, we never heard them. Rosemarie tied a length of rope to Baba's collar and had her stay with us while we worked. She never seemed to hear anything either."

"They probably circled around to the road, then followed that back to the Jackson place," Tony said. "Could be they just got there this morning. We didn't notice anything when we went by on our way to work."

"We weren't looking then, either," Becca said.

"Oh, we would have seen that big RV they parked in Jackson's lane," she insisted. "We sure noticed it coming home."

"Well, you did a good camouflage job," Becca smiled. "Those trees look quite natural out there." She peered out the kitchen window before opening the refrigerator.

"It's only temporary, Becca. They'll begin to lose their needles in no time," Heppert reminded her.

"Maybe we can replace them with ones we dig up. Wouldn't that work?" Tony looked to Becca, who nodded agreement.

"We have to leave," Margaret said quietly. "We mustn't wait to finish the van, either. We can't take the chance of involving you any further."

"We are involved because we want to be," Becca gave her a little shake. "I don't want you to leave yet. Besides, we don't know if those people bought the Jackson place or are just using it for a week or so. They may be gone by Friday."

"Even so, someone else could come along and you'd be in danger again. We have to go," Heppert said. "Soon." 

"You could take the Bronco," Tony offered. "They won't be looking for that."

"And you drive the van to town? I don't think so," Heppert shook her head. "We talked it over while we were waiting for you to get home. We need to contact a friend back in Madison who can help us, but we need to do it in a round about way."

"How can we help?" Becca asked.

* * *

Game day dawned chilly but clear, and heated to a perfect temperature by mid-morning. A large crowd of women converged on the park, those who would play gathering on the field to warm up.

"How did you pick sides?" Chris asked, as she and Sue sat in the bleachers.

"We thought about just tossing a coin for each player, tails on one team and heads on the other. But then we decided it would make a better game to evenly divide up the skills. We know most of the players pretty well, and the others are known by other players, so we were able to judge pretty well, I hope."

When the toss was done and the first team's pitcher took the mound, Dawes walked over to them and handed a ball to Sue. The crowd quieted, but Sue sat for a long moment looking down at the ball in her hand. Chris put her hand on Sue's thigh and squeezed as hard as she could.

Sue smiled and nodded. Rising to stand, she took a deep breath, then bellowed, "Play ball, ladies!" as she sailed the ball out to the pitcher.

Chris was glad she'd brought a medical kit. They had indeed formed two equally matched teams. No one was seriously hurt, but they played hard and kept her busy. One player was even knocked unconscious sliding into third, but came to within seconds. Sue insisted on taking care of that player herself, and Chris handed over the cold pack, assuming she wanted to give Chris a break.

* * *

"You were pretty good," Chris said, as Dawes washed her hands and face under the spigot on the picnic grounds.

"Ah, look at that face, D," Sue chuckled, elbowing Dawes. "Nothing like that expression, is there?"

Chris realized she was blushing, despite herself, and ambidextrously, but lightly, punched them both in their stomachs. They joined the other picnic organizers who had already started the coals, and went to work laying out the food.

Later, as Chris was visiting with a couple Deidre had known quite well, she saw Dawes walking in the distance with a woman she didn't recognize. Dawes handed something, perhaps a piece of paper, to the woman who immediately put it in her pocket without reading it.

That night, as they lay together, Dawes mentioned she had a charter to fly the next day.

"I should stay home from work, then," Chris offered. "We haven't left Sue alone, and tomorrow may be rough for her."

"I thought I might take her with me, if she would like to go."

"Will you have room?"

"I won't be flying a chopper. I am taking a Cessna, a four-seater. Plenty of room," Dawes nodded.

"It's been a while since you've flown a plane, hasn't it?"

"I have kept up my license, with practice flights, at the airfield," Dawes reassured her. "You won't be losing your shortstop, Doctor."

"Good. Think you could dress up in that uniform again when you get back?" Chris asked, moving to kneel above her.

"Speaking of things you don't forget how to do," Dawes grinned, and began reacquainting herself.

* * *

Heppert wondered if she were hearing a boat out on some nearby lake, then waved to the others as she became sure the sound was coming from over the trees. She watched the airstrip from the hill above the road where Becca and Tony's Bronco waited, still covered with morning dew. Soon, a small plane appeared from over the trees at the far end of the runway, landed smoothly, turned at the end of the strip and began taxiing to the single quonset beside the tarmac. Heppert held a pair of binoculars to her eyes and smiled.

"Dawes, you devil, it's good to see you," she laughed, and turned to half slide, half hop back down the hill toward the three women, one cat, and twenty dogs in ten cardboard boxes who waited below.

As Tony drove onto the tarmac, Dawes stepped from the building and waved the Bronco toward the plane. Sue climbed out of the plane as the Bronco pulled up, and Margaret and Heppert both waved through the window to her. Sue peered in.

"Who the hell?" She leaned in closer, uttered, "Hep...," then stopped and looked toward the front seats.

"It's okay, Sue," Heppert laughed. "Becca and Tony know who we are."

Sue scowled at Dawes. "Look at this, D," she grimaced. "She's made herself up to look like a pimp with a low testosterone level."

"Don't make fun of that mustache," Becca demanded. "It's the best we could do without resorting to Elmer's."

"I would give you both a big hug," Dawes offered, "but we better save that for the other side. You are declared as a honeymooning fishing party and, thanks to you," Dawes nodded to Tony and Becca, "they declined to search us."

"They're more worried about what comes in," Tony shrugged.

"Right," Dawes agreed, and looked back to Margaret and Heppert. "And we won't have to worry about the other end of it. You will be well received."

Heppert put an arm around Margaret's waist and spoke for both of them, "Thank you for this, Dawes."

Sue grinned and winked at Dawes, who tilted her head with a raised eyebrow, then laughed. "Let's get loaded, then."

As they placed each of the boxes into the luggage compartment, Margaret checked to be sure cotton plugs were still in each dog's ears, then propped open the lids with clothespins. Dawes put a hand on her shoulder before shutting the compartment.

"They will be fine, Margaret. They will sleep right through it, and tomorrow be groggier from the sleeping medicine than from the flight." 

Margaret smiled and nodded, then turned to say goodbye to Becca and Tony.

"We'll see you in a month, in a newly painted blue van," Becca promised, and hugged her tightly, then went to Heppert. "We're awfully glad you came into Margaret's life, you know?"

Heppert grinned, nodded, and hugged back. As Becca stood back, Tony grabbed them both, one arm crooked around a neck each, and pulled them in to her. "Bye," she managed, then turned and stalked around the front of the Bronco, to climb into the driver's seat.

"I guess we're leaving, now," Becca shrugged, blew a kiss, and joined her lover in the vehicle as Tony started the engine. She handed Alex' kennel to Margaret through the window, and they pulled away.

The Bronco idled at the edge of the road while Dawes taxied to the end of the runway, turned, and proceeded swiftly into the takeoff and ascent. As they continued to climb, leaving the airstrip farther below, Heppert saw the Bronco begin to move down the road.

* * *

"Call me Gabrielle," the white-haired, strong-handed woman said to Heppert, who had addressed her as Mrs. Dawes. "We are going to be good friends. You have brought my Marie-Claire back, if only for a little while."

Heppert was relieved. "Mrs. Dawes" just had not sounded right, somehow.

"Maman," Dawes' voice behind them was almost a whisper. Heppert stepped aside for them to greet each other, but they merely stood and gazed at each other across the distance. Finally, the older woman held out her arms, and Dawes walked into her embrace. Heppert left them alone, following Sue and Margaret to the other side of the plane to open the cargo hatch.

Most of the dogs were still sleeping, but a few were whining, trying to keep their eyes open. The three women busied themselves with removing the cotton ear plugs, then began loading the boxes, the few pieces of luggage, and Alex into the van Gabrielle had brought to transport them back to her lodge.

"Better remove the mustache before we leave here," Dawes advised Heppert when they were all in the van.

"You should be yourselves now," Gabrielle smiled into the rearview mirror.

Margaret exhaled a large breath and pulled the wig off her head as Heppert peeled the mustache.

"You still don't look right," Sue complained to Heppert. "I don't know many women with black hair on their heads and freckles on the backs of their hands."

"I never thought of that," Heppert whispered, looking to Margaret.

"Good thing you're not on the police force!" Margaret said to Sue, and shook her head.

"If we had water around here, I could wash it out," Heppert offered, running her hand through the short strands and showing her darkened fingers. "It's not permanent."

"Bon!" Gabrielle pronounced. "Marie-Claire, you have emergency water?"

Dawes hopped out, climbed back into the cockpit, and emerged with a gallon jug of water. "Is this enough, do you think?" she asked, handing the jug to Heppert.

"Sure, but where...?"

Gabrielle turned the ignition switch, and threw the van into gear, speaking in French to Dawes.

As they drove toward the edge of the runway, Dawes explained, "Maman will pull over into the woods after we are far enough along the road. You can wash it out then. You have shampoo in your luggage?"

At the lodge, Gabrielle helped them settle the dogs into a kennel which had obviously not been used for many years.

"It needs repair," she acknowledged. "But it will do for now, eh?"

Margaret gently deposited one of the sleepy beagles in a nest of fresh, sweet straw. "It will do very well, Gabrielle. Thank you."

"Maman," Dawes' warning tone caused them all to turn in her direction. They followed her slight head movement to see a tall man in work clothes approaching.

"Jules," Gabrielle responded quietly, and turned back to stroke the head of an appreciative pup. "He believes you to simply be guests who arrived with the shipment of hunting dogs." When the man reached them, Gabrielle spoke to him in French. He nodded, staring glumly at the dogs.

"Oui, Madame," Jules grumbled, and trudged toward an ancient, brick building Heppert took to be a barn.

"Jules will feed and water them," Gabrielle said, more to Margaret than the others. She squeezed Margaret's shoulder and smiled. "He will be kind to them, do not worry. It is people Jules does not care for."

"Americans in particular?" Sue asked, and smiled at Dawes.

Gabrielle looked up sharply, then her face softened as she watched her daughter grin back at Sue. She turned back to Margaret and Heppert with, "For Jules and some of the others, to know you are running from the U.S. authorities might warm them to you and make it go easier for you. But it was too much to chance. Better you wait for them to forget where you are from."

"I did warn them, Maman, that the weather wasn't the only thing that could freeze a Yank up here."

Gabrielle then took them into the lodge, a rambling thrice added on two-story cabin of thick logs and stone chimneys. Dawes and Sue she led to a room with two single beds. Then she led Margaret and Heppert to a room with one double bed.

"This will be comfortable?" She asked, opening a window.

"Tres confortable," Margaret responded.

Gabrielle turned to her and winked. "Marie-Claire said you speak French. Bon. You," she laughed and wagged a finger at the again redheaded Heppert, "we will teach, non?"

"Oui," Heppert smiled despite the wrench on her heart. Gabrielle's maternal warmth sparkled from her eyes and lit the room, and reminded Heppert once again how far she was from home.

* * *

"Just how much did you tell you mother about us?" Heppert whispered to Dawes as they joined up in the hallway.

"Well, of course, I was only guessing," Dawes grinned, "but I was pretty sure, from what Fran told me."

"I notice she gave you and Sue separate beds."

"She knows Sue and I are not lovers," Dawes explained, as they followed Sue and Margaret back down the stairs.

"Does she know about Dr. McCaleb?"

"Not much, yet. How did you know about Chris?"

That reminded Heppert again of what she'd been wanting to talk to Sue about since she first saw her climb out of the plane that morning in Wisconsin.

"Sue," Heppert called to her, "how is Deidre? God, I wish she could have come with you!"

"Yes," Margaret agreed, "I would love to see her, too."

Sue turned to gaze back at Dawes, and Heppert's gut clenched at the look they exchanged.

"Hep...," Sue began, stopped, then started again. "I wanted to wait to tell you. After you were more settled in."

Heppert searched for something in Sue's face or gestures to tell her it wasn't as bad as she was thinking, but finally she acknowledged the stretches of gray at Sue's temples, the smudges under her eyes that had not been there two months before. Sue had been through something agonizing.

"She's gone?" Heppert couldn't stop the tears, wasn't really aware of them until she saw Sue approach through a wave, felt herself lurch as Sue wrapped her arms around her.

She could only stand the confinement for a short time. She broke loose and ran out of the lodge toward the woods. Behind her, threatening to catch up to her at any moment, was the understanding that Deidre had died while she was away.

Eventually, she stopped running, grabbed a tree to hold onto anything solid, and let it reach her. Sue caught up just after, and this time Heppert let Sue hold her. When she had quieted, Sue made her put on a jacket.

"It's cold, Hep. Gabrielle gave me this to bring to you."

"How?"

"Her heart. In her sleep," Sue whispered, stroking her hair and holding her close again.

"Oh, no," Heppert moaned. She couldn't say it, couldn't face it.

"You don't understand, Hep," Sue began to rock her. "She had a flare-up before she even knew you and Margaret had pulled Operation Beagle." Sue nodded and smiled into her eyes, "That's what she called it. She was really proud of you both."

"But when...?" It seemed so long ago, Heppert had to think back to figure the timing.

"It happened hours before you pulled off the job," Sue explained. "You were probably already at Margaret's friends' place before we even heard about it, in the hospital. In fact," Sue grasped both of Heppert's hands in hers, and held them together close to her chest, "rooting for you and Margaret probably helped more than anything in her getting stronger."

"She didn't die right away?"

"No, just two weeks ago," Sue whispered, and pulled an envelope from her back pocket. "She dictated this for you after she got home from the hospital. She had me type it up, hoping we would eventually get an address to send it to."

Heppert stared at the envelope Sue held out to her. Deidre was still alive two weeks ago. Two weeks ago, she could have seen her eyes, touched her face, said goodbye. If she had knocked on their door the night she stole their license plates... No, she remembered. She had stood in the darkness of the driveway that night and knew she couldn't say goodbye. She never would have left.

Sue reached into another pocket and pulled out a paper napkin, daubed at Heppert's cheeks. Heppert took the napkin, rose and walked a few steps away, blew her nose. Then she turned back to Sue and reached out to touch the envelope with her fingertips. Sue waited patiently. With a deep breath, Heppert took the envelope, refolded it in half the way it had been in Sue's pocket, and crossed her arms, tucking the envelope out of sight.

"Let's go back," Heppert whispered. "I'm cold."

Sue threw an arm around her shoulders and led her back. Heppert realized she would not have known which direction to take to return to the lodge, but Sue carefully picked their way through the trees. When they entered the lodge, Margaret rose from where she'd been sitting with Dawes in front of the fireplace.

"Oh, Rosemarie," she murmured into her ear, drawing her close.

"She wrote us," Heppert mumbled, and held up the envelope.

"You two go upstairs," Dawes suggested. "We will bring you something to eat, okay?"

Heppert let Margaret take her hand, and lead her up to their room. Once there, she sat on the edge of the bed.

"Margaret, let's wait to read this?"

Margaret nodded, and Heppert slipped the envelope under her pillow. She let Margaret remove her clothes and tuck her in, then Margaret disrobed and joined her. Sleep came very quickly.

* * *

She woke to the familiar vibration of Alex purring against her back as he groomed himself. Just beyond Alex, Margaret snored softly. Then, she woke to the rest of it: Quebec, never go home, Deidre is dead. Deidre.

She reached under her pillow and found the envelope. Rising silently, gently, she gathered her clothes from where Margaret had neatly folded and left them. Heppert guessed it was dawn by the softness of light drifting into the corners of the room from the windows. Still, it would be enough, she thought, and pulled on her clothes for warmth.

Alex, as always preferring an awake and moving human to a sleeping one, nestled into her lap as she sat by the window. He sniffed at the envelope, then rubbed his cheek against its edge.

"Deidre's letter," Heppert whispered to him, and he stared into her eyes and purred, then rubbed his head against her hand. She looked over at the sweet curve of woman under the covers, and hoped Margaret wouldn't mind her opening the letter without her. The letter, she discovered as she unfolded it, was wrapped around fifty dollars.

Dearest Hep,

I hope by now you are safe, and I hope someday soon we get word of where we can send this. For however long it is until we see each other, I will continue to think of you and imagine you thinking of me. 

I see you happy, with Margaret and Alex, though I'm having trouble visualizing twenty beagles. Tell Margaret, when the time comes, that her extraordinary style of sliding into home is irresistible.

Hep, please don't be sad at being away from us. Sometimes we have to leave behind security, and even love, to experience more of life. Your adventure is only beginning.

That's why I'm returning the fifty dollars you left. Let it be our donation to the cause, and we can feel more a part of it. (It was rather exciting, imagining you tearing across the countryside between our license plates.)

I do love you, Rosemarie Heppert, 

Deidre

P.S.--When you watch the sun rise and hear the birds begin to call, think of me. If you know that I'll be thinking of you, we won't feel so far away from each other.

 

She looked up from the letter as the first glancing rays of morning skittered through the trees. One leaf in a tree near the window caught the early light directly. It gleamed as though lit from within, and its hue, particularly when seen through a tear, was precisely the color of Deidre's eyes.


	10. Epilogue

Light glowed warmly from the windows of the house as Chris parked her car. She hurried up the stairs, pausing to knock on a window to Sue. Dawes waited at the door in her softball uniform.

"Lose the glove," Chris instructed, and began removing her clothes.

"The glove might have been interesting," Dawes said later, drawing a line with her finger along Chris' body.

"Sometime when I have more patience, maybe," Chris grinned, stretched, then laughed as Dawes rolled over her, growling.

When they had slowed to gentle caresses, Chris asked, "How are Margaret and Heppert?"

Dawes pushed up from the pillow to peer down at Chris. "So much for protecting you from worry!" She mumbled, then, "They are safe and, I hope, will be happy there."

"Where?"

"With my mother, in Quebec," Dawes face had taken on a very soft expression with those words.

"You saw your mother, D. I'm so glad."

"She wants to meet you, Chris. We plan to return in a month, to take more of Heppert's belongings to her. Could you get away for a week or so, to come with us?"

"Yes, I'd like that. It might be the time I need to make a decision. My residency will be done in three months, D. I don't think I want to continue with this kind of work."

Dawes said nothing, gently stroked Chris' hair at her brow, and nodded. A knock at the door, followed by Sue's voice, interrupted. They called her back to the bedroom, and she stopped in the doorway, pressing her outstretched hands against either jamb.

"I didn't need to follow your voices," she grinned. "I tripped over your cleats, D, following the trail of abandoned clothing."

Chris motioned for Sue to come to her. Winking to Dawes, Sue hurried to Chris, wrapped her arms around her and kissed her in a long, loving embrace. Chris had meant to share such a degree of warmth, but hadn't expected Sue's embrace to elicit such a strong response in herself. As Sue slowly drew back, Chris felt very aware of her nakedness beneath the thin cotton sheet between them.

"Oh good, Susan, now I'll never be enough for her," Dawes smiled.

"Well, I'll just try to be available, then," Sue smiled back over to her. "Which brings me to a decision I need you both to help me make." 

Her eyes, Chris observed, shone with a directness, an energy she hadn't seen before. Sue looked stronger, Chris thought. 'You will see me in each other's eyes,' Deidre had said.

"We have to decide whether to keep the house," Sue continued. "It's always been in Deidre's family. I thought I would be close to Deidre as long as I stayed here." She looked over to Dawes, her eyes now beginning to fill, "She was still here when we left, D. I expected to find her here when we got back." Sue's voice stopped suddenly as a tear coursed her cheek, others threatening to follow.

Dawes sat up and drew closer, wrapping her arms loosely around Sue from the back, and leaning her head against Sue's. "But," Sue whispered, "it's not the same. She's farther away now. It," she struggled to express her feelings, "it's more just me--remembering her--than Deidre actually being there with me."

"I think you still need to stay up here with us, Susan, while you make that decision."

"While we make that decision, D?" Sue asked, looking down at Dawes' hand she held in her lap.

"While we make that decision," Dawes nodded, and tightened her encircling arms. "We were talking about Chris' future just before you arrived. She thought perhaps our next trip to Quebec would be a time to make decisions."

"A month or so away?" Chris asked, covering Sue and Dawes' hands in Sue's lap. "You need time, Sue," she brushed carefully at a tear resting just below Sue's eye, leaned forward to kiss her cheek. 'We'll take care of Sue,' Chris repeated her promise and added, 'you knew I'd want to--that I loved her too.'

The next evening, they helped Sue move her computer and files upstairs to Heppert's apartment. She began writing, and soon Heppert's living room floor was an obstacle course of open or stacked reference books, Sue's desk a clutter of pages, pens, and coffee mugs. Sue confided she was creating little, mostly just editing what she had previously been working on. Still, she didn't say it sadly, Chris thought, but rather with a contented acceptance. Apparently, it was enough for the time being.

Dawes' charters were day runs, mostly hops across Lake Michigan and back, and she and Sue spent one evening packing Heppert's clothes. Women from the coalition for Margaret and Heppert's legal defense fund, which was pushing for a full pardon, were coming to collect Heppert's stereo and television, the only sellable items Heppert had owned besides her bike, which the police had confiscated from PetLove's warehouse, and still held.

"We won't see that again," Sue predicted.

"I'm afraid you're right," Chris agreed. She looked at the stereo and television and shook her head. "They won't get much for these, you know, even in an auction attended by women from the community."

"Then, perhaps we should add some interest," Dawes suggested.

"I dreaded the idea of having a garage sale of our stuff," Sue agreed. "This would save me the trouble, and Deidre would have loved the idea of doing it for Heppert."

When Ellen and her crew were shown the garage, El said she understood why Sue had recommended they bring a van or pickup. As the women began loading, Ellen stepped to Chris' side and observed, "Nice collection," as they watched a box of women's literature go by.

"You said you didn't have room for them," Chris whispered.

"I'm not complaining," she replied, keeping her voice equally low. "I'm just predicting the women will be impressed with Heppert's choice of books." Her eyebrows rose at the next load passing by. "And tapes?"

"D has all those, too," Chris shrugged. "Besides, how do you know those are ours--they could have been Heppert's."

Ellen laughed and shook her head. "Oh, Chris, you'll never change--you've never unpacked them. Those are the same boxes I put them in when I left them at the apartment!"

"It's for a good cause," Chris whispered slowly, ending the sentence with a wide grin.

"Touche," El smirked, allowing her the pleasure of a refrain Ellen had so often repeated to Chris during their life together.

"Damn," Sue stared wide-eyed at Dawes, and Chris followed Dawes' gaze to the end of the driveway where a police squad car was pulling slowly in.

"Everyone be calm," Dawes murmured, her voice just loud enough for the women to hear. "This is a legal activity, Susan."

"Yes," Sue said, handing Deidre's jam box to a woman in the van. "This is."

Chris was sure Sue's emphasis wasn't lost on Dawes. Her stomach knotted as she wondered if the police could have discovered how Margaret and Heppert had eluded them. She stepped to Dawes' side and squeezed her arm as Sue walked down the driveway to greet Officer Berens.

Berens was already out of the squad car and walking toward the back of it. She spoke over her shoulder to Sue, who followed her and looked into the trunk. Then she and Berens both reached in and pulled out a bicycle.

"Heppert's bike," Dawes breathed.

Berens held out a clipboard and pen to Sue, who took the pen and wrote. They spoke for a bit, then they both looked down at their feet. Chris, watching Sue's head duck, then nod, guessed they were talking about Deidre. She now recognized Sue's habitual body language when thanking people for their expressions of sympathy.

Berens shut the trunk, waved quickly to the women still gaping from the garage, got into her car and backed out. She exchanged a last wave with Sue once the car's nose was pointed down the street, then pulled off. Sue was grinning, shaking her head as she rolled the bike up the driveway.

"She said that when she confiscated this at PetLove, one of Heppert's co-workers told her they couldn't believe Heppert had left it behind. She figured, since it meant so much to Heppert, we should have it back for the auction."

"How did she know about the auction?" Ellen asked.

Sue shrugged, "I didn't ask."

"She's interesting," one of the women remarked. "Anybody know her?"

"I've never seen her around," Ellen answered, nor had any of the others.

"How did she get the bike out?" Ellen asked.

"They're closing the case," Sue smiled widely, then looked at Dawes. "She wanted us to understand that the charge still stands, but they won't be actively investigating any longer. She said they didn't see any reason to keep the bike."

"It's unusual," one of the women commented. "Normally, you'd never see the bike again. It would have been sold at a police auction, or would have just rusted away until they gave it to one of the Christmas fix-up charities for kids. Even if they said it could be claimed, you'd have had to go down to their warehouse and sign it out."

"She's been very kind through all of this," Sue noted. "I've had the impression that she's really been pulling for Margaret and Heppert to get a fair shake."

They finished loading the van, including Heppert's bike, and the women drove out of the driveway.

"She called her Heppert," Sue observed as Dawes shut the garage door. "Just like we do."

"Maybe she picked it up from you," Chris offered.

"She actually said we could include the bike in the auction or 'whatever Heppert would want you to do.' She said that she wouldn't be asking any questions if the bike wasn't in the auction."

"What do you make of that?" Dawes asked.

"I think she meant we could take it to Heppert, if she wants it."

"Could she use it there?" Chris asked.

"No," Sue shook her head. "That's why I let Ellen take it."

"There aren't many paved roads there," Dawes agreed. "But, Susan, you really think she knows we know where Heppert is?"

"I don't know that for sure," Sue gazed down the driveway. "It's just a feeling I've had the last two times she's come around. Both times without her partner, to give me information she didn't have to give me." Sue looked from Dawes to Chris, and smiled. "And this last time, she said she heard about my losing Deidre. She told me she was sorry, but was glad I had such good friends."

* * *

One night, as Chris nestled against Dawes and listened to the sound of Sue in the shower, Dawes told her she would be away for several days on a charter.

"Chris," she said, "if you and Sue want to make love while I'm gone, I understand."

"I'd rather you were here with us," Chris replied. She had thought about it, especially in the last couple weeks since Dawes and Sue returned from Quebec.

"Both of us," Dawes stared, "at the same time?"

Chris had to grin. She'd not expected Dawes' reaction to be surprise. "I love you both," she offered in explanation.

Dawes dipped her head, a rather French gesture, Chris thought. Then she smiled, "If Sue is ready."

When they heard Sue leave the bathroom, Dawes called to her. She came to the door, and Chris motioned her to join them.

"Chris wants us to be together," Dawes began.

"Come to bed with us?" Chris asked. Sue reached down and stroked Chris' head, then looked over at Dawes who smiled and added, "If you are ready."

Sue nodded, leaned toward Dawes, and they kissed. Chris grew warm watching them, then felt a surge of emotion when Sue bent down and kissed Chris the way she had the last time, long and lovingly. Sue pulled back and smiled into her eyes. Chris undid the belt of Sue's bathrobe, slipped her hands inside, and Sue inhaled deeply as Chris' hands moved over her.

Dawes helped Sue shed her robe and motioned for her to lie down. As Sue obeyed, she drew Chris with her. Chris felt Sue's hands caress and explore her body, and her thigh drew up between Chris' legs. Sue smiled as Chris uttered a soft sound, then looked over Chris' shoulder. Dawes lay behind Chris, moving in closer, and began to kiss the back of her neck.

"Oh, D," Chris exhaled, and grasped Sue's wide shoulders, felt Sue's muscles tightening under her hands. 

Sue grinned, kissed her lips and whispered, "Hold on, Chris."

Sue's hand began stroking, her fingers entering, stroking more. Then Dawes slowly moved down Chris' back, massaging and kissing as Chris tried to slow herself, to let the pleasure linger. As Dawes moved up the small of her back to her shoulders, Sue kissed Chris again, deeply, until Chris pulled away and cried out. She pressed her face into Sue's neck and held on, both their voices in her ear. As she convulsed, Chris heard Sue call her name, felt Dawes murmuring against her back, then she heard nothing over the roar of her own emotions.

Slowly, the energy abated, she felt full and soft again.

"My," Sue murmured, and Chris opened her eyes to find her smiling down at her. "You do get energetic, don't you?"

"I should have warned you," Dawes chuckled, and kissed Chris' shoulder.

Sue's eyes danced, and Chris thought of Deidre. "Oh," she smiled back, moving her hands slowly along Sue's body, watching her eyes change as she inhaled and tightened. "We're not done yet." You are alive, my love, Chris thought. And we want you to be ecstatic about that.

Chris slid out from between them, smiled to Dawes who nodded. As Chris knelt between Sue's legs, Dawes moved to lean over Sue.

"D, is she going to...," Sue gasped as Chris began. Dawes held her in her arms.

"Let me know if insanity threatens," Dawes murmured. Sue moaned and laid back as Chris continued.

"You scream a lot," Chris teased, when they were done.

"Not any more than D." Sue reached over to tickle Dawes with a finger.

"I was talking about both of you," Chris yawned. When Sue was done, Chris had been worried about having enough energy left for Dawes. But Sue had helped, and Dawes, after all they'd been about, required little prologue. Now all three lay together exhausted, and slept.

* * *

Chris woke, sunlight filling the room, seeing Deidre. Her sea-green eyes were bright, her smile illuminating. 

"Deidre," Sue murmured in her ear, and Chris stroked Sue's hair.

It would take time, Chris knew. But they had time, and Deidre's love, to share.


End file.
